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‘Screening at airports can now be stopped’

The WHO expressed that India should now stop the thermal screening of passengers for H1N1 virus at the airport as the virus has “well established” itself in the community.

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) expressed that India should now stop the thermal screening of passengers for H1N1 virus at the airport as the virus has “well established” itself in the community and will not give the desired results. India had installed four thermal scanners at the Mumbai and Delhi airports in an experimental basis. Health ministry officials have reported that the machines are only detecting 5% positive cases when the detection rates were as high as 20%.

In a recent meeting in Bangkok, WHO categorised countries into three groups—no case, sporadic cases and wider community spread. According to WHO, airport screening was beneficial for the first two categories.

It has been understood that 773 out of the 2026 persons tested positive, so far, were identified through airport screening. As many as 99 cases were detected on Tuesday. The rest were detected through contact and were self-reported.

Meanwhile, WHO has offered support to Pune-based Indian vaccine manufacturing company Serum Institute of India (SII) by committing $2 million to the company, besides technical assistance. The isolated virus strain has already been provided to the company. SII is among the three companies to who WHO has transferred technology, the other two being Biopharma in Indonesia and GPO in Thailand. All the three manufacturers will have a collective capacity of about 220 million doses annually, with a surge capacity that could reach 420 million pandemic (H1N1) 2009 vaccine doses annually.

 “India will be ready with the vaccine in another two to four months. Till then we should not panic. We should emphasise on preventive actions like washing our hands, take immense fluid and cover the mouth and the nose if showing flu symptoms,” said Poonam K Singh, deputy regional director, WHO India.
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