Governmentt may open Tamiflu sale

Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, in one of the most comprehensive statements on the influenza A (H1N1) virus, has said that Reeda Shaikh of Pune could have been saved had her diagnosis been on time.

“There were mistakes on both sides. She went to a private practitioner, then another and yet another before she was tested. Pune is not a village. If she had been tested on time, she could have been saved,” Azad told Rajya Sabha members, who were grilling him on swine flu.

The minister allayed fear that there were inadequate testing facilities or low stocks of Tamiflu, the medicine used to treat H1N1. “There are enough reagents (chemicals) for testing up to one crore people. We have also stockpiled 60 lakh doses of Tamiflu,” he said, adding that the number of testing centres has gone up to 19 from two at the beginning of the outbreak.

Azad refuted allegations that the health ministry had not been able to control the outbreak of H1N1 in India. He said that apart from the 574 suspected carriers who had so far been tested, another 7,000 air passengers, suspected to have travelled in their vicinity, had been located through contact testing.

“Had we not contacted these 7,000 people and ensured that they were free of the disease, the number of cases might have been seven million, because that is how fast it (swine flu) spreads,” Azad said.

He also said that the government was not only thinking of roping in private hospitals to treat patients and maintain quarantine, but also suggesting an open sale of Tamiflu, which at present is dispensed only by government hospitals. “In two to three days, we will review the sale of Tamiflu in the open market,” he said.

Responding to a supplementary, Azad said each swine flu test costs at least Rs5,000, while tests that return positive cost Rs10,000, each test taking six hours.