'Airport screening proved a lifesaver'

New Delhi: According to health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad flu has not reached the pandemic stage in India. Azad, praising India's phenomenal job in keeping the virus quiet for so long, said industrialized countries such as UK, US, Canada, Australia and Argentina were reporting positive cases in lakhs every week.
''In England, there were 30,000 cases of H1N1 last week and 1.10 lakh cases the week before. Around 36 people have died there so far. In Argentina, they have registered a total of 7.62 lakh cases of flu of which 93% are H1N1 infections. They have had 337 deaths,'' the minister said.
According to the health minister, two of India's innovative interventions — entry screening at airports and ports and mass scale contact tracing — have proved a saver. ''Or else, by now we would have had crores of H1N1 infected people,'' Azad said.
He said India's interventions had been applauded globally. ''We have till now screened over 45 lakh passengers in 22 international airports. Every third H1N1 positive case in India was identified through airport screening. And then we tracked down every single person the infected patient may have come in contact with, looking for H1N1 symptoms in them,'' he said.
10/08/09 Kounteya Sinha/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Aug 2009