NEW DELHI, Jan 2: A leading Indian virologist says that people returning from Hong Kong should be screened to detect carriers of the new influenza virus which has created panic worldwide.Kalyan Banerjee, former director of the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune, said that sero-surveillance of passengers arriving at airports as well as the poultry birds at hatcheries is urgently required to prevent the virus getting a foothold in the country.
The new influenza virus H5N1 has crossed the species barrier jumping from pigs to birds and now to humans. Believed to have spread from China, the virus is held responsible for four deaths in Hong Kong where authorities have slaughtered more than a million chicken suspected to be carriers.
According to Banerjee, influenza virus has the propensity to mutate and recombine. ``we do not have full details of the situation in Hong Kong. If the virus had spread to humans but had killed only four persons, there is no cause for undue alarm. In any case we must
take precautions,'' he said.
A scientist at the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in New Delhi said India did not have the tools to detect the virus. He said India is not one of the countries to whom ``test kits'' had been distributed by the Centres for Disease Control of the United States.
N P Gupta, ex-director of NIV said it was a short-sighted policy of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to have closed down all laboratories that were once working on influenza virus.
``we are lucky that we have at least one laboratory in NIV where influenza work is still being done,'' he said adding that ICMR had also shot down a proposal to build a high security lab in Pune to handle deadly viruses like influenza.
According to Gupta, man-to-man transmission of the new virus is rather weak. ``otherwise it could have already come to India given the heavy air traffic between India and the far east.''
Subhash Arya, former deputy chief of NICD says the bird flu virus is bound to enter
India some day. ``If we are not prepared to detect the virus we will have a repeat of the situation in 1994 when plague caught us unawares.''
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
