| |
| |
![]() |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
MUMBAI: India on Monday registered its first H1N1 flu death after a 14-year-old girl in the western city of Pune died from the disease, media reports said.
The teenager was admitted to a private hospital on July 27, six days after initially feeling unwell and consulting doctors. She was put on an intensive care ward on July 29 and confirmed to have H1N1 flu the following day.
No one at the state or city health department was immediately available to comment when contacted by AFP but the domestic Press Trust of India news agency said the student had been given the anti-viral drug Oseltamivir.
She failed to respond to treatment and died on Monday evening after suffering multiple organ failure, an unnamed senior health ministry official was quoted as saying.
Officials said on Monday that three more people tested positive for H1N1 flu in Pune, taking the number of confirmed cases in the city to 101, of which 64 have been discharged.
The latest cases were of two students and a 26-year-old who had returned from Germany. They have been moved to an isolation ward in hospital, PTI said.
Some 147 people have been confirmed as having H1N1 infections in the wider western Maharashtra state.
PTI reported on August 1 that there were a total of 525 cases of H1N1 in India, of which 369 have been discharged. Some 2,361 people had been tested.
Mumbai's top public health doctor Jairaj Thankear told AFP in May that India was "certainly" at risk of having cases of H1N1 flu, most likely from people bringing in the virus from abroad.
Many of India's confirmed cases involve people who have returned from abroad, but Thanekar said a combination of climatic, meteorological and social factors was likely to lower the risk of human to human transmission.
"We are having high temperatures. In some places it's as high as 47 degrees Celsius (116 degrees Fahrenheit). In Mumbai it's bearable but there's humidity up to 87 to 88 percent," Thanekar told AFP.
"Viruses don't thrive in those kind of conditions."
Mumbai - one of the most densely-populated places on earth - also has few pig farms, reducing the risk of animal to human transmission. The city's 18 million people had also proved resilient to viruses in the past, he said.
Dr Sanjay Oak, who oversees the running of state hospitals in Greater Mumbai region, recalled that India was relatively spared from the 2002-2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
"We didn't have SARS in Mumbai. One of the theories that was put forward was the climate and heat was probably not sustainable for the virus and it destroys itself. That could be one of the reasons," he told AFP in May.
Nevertheless, precautionary measures have been taken, including setting up quarantine centres and a specially-designated hospital with up to 1,000 beds to treat confirmed cases. - AFP/de
|
