Bird flu season back, but govt sleeps

Kounteya Sinha / TNN / Oct 18, 2006, 02:51 IST

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With October, the bird flu season is back once again and India stands hopelessly unprepared for another outbreak.

NEW DELHI: A senior health ministry official's comment couldn't have been more apt "Nothing works in India till there's an emergency."
Just last February, when India announced that the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus had arrived in the country, the threat of a human pandemic was more than real. Officials hurried containment plans. And then suddenly, all was forgotten.
With October, the bird flu season is back once again and India stands hopelessly unprepared for another outbreak.Five Bio Safety Level (BSL) III labs to test animal samples for H5N1 virus were announced.
Not one has come up till now. The High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal, which tested thousands of suspected samples for the virus early this year, continues to be the only hope.

Three labs to test human samples were also announced. Only one National Institute of Communicable Diseases BSL-III lab will soon be functional. At present, only National Institute of Virology, Pune, has an accredited BSL-III lab that can test human samples.
HSADL, Bhopal, which had isolated the bird flu virus, is yet to share the virus with Indian Council of Medical Research. The two institutes were supposed to "jointly undertake studies to better understand the virus". India has not even sent the virus to Australia for validation.

According to international norms, once a country declares an H5N1 outbreak, it has to send the virus samples to another country for validation. Sources said officials from Centre for Disease Control, Atlanta, have repeatedly asked India to send the samples to Australia. But HSADL has refused to share the virus.
Scientists say though government's attention towards bird flu has dipped, the virus remains just as dangerous and just as able to cause a worldwide outbreak like the one seen since 1918, when 50 million people died.

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