HEALTH: India Still Cool to Pneumonia-like Bug

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 5 2003 (IPS) - With nary a case of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) surfacing in India, authorities remain cool to the mystery pneumonia-like bug that has claimed 80 lives and infected more than 2,000 others worldwide.

Satellite television images from Hong Kong and Singapore have had little effect on the public here and at major medical facilities like the state-run Safdarjang Hospital, the only people wearing protective masks are doctors actually involved in surgical operations.

Officials are, for the moment, concerned more with containing the spread of panic than any virus.

”We are not asking doctors, nurses and health workers to wear masks because that could trigger panic,” said Bhavani Thyagarajan, a top official at the Union Health Ministry.

She said, however, that passengers arriving from foreign countries would soon be asked to fill out forms detailing ailments they have suffered from in recent times and those actually suffering form coughs and high fevers, the main symptoms would be taken to hospitals and isolated.

”We will soon have teams of doctors screening passengers arriving at the four major international airports – but this is as a matter of precaution given the WHO alert, ” said Dr Shiv Lal, director of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD).

Visa officials in Indian missions abroad have been told to warn passengers that they could be isolated if they developed symptoms associated with SARS.

Lal said while the NICD has got down to monitoring the disease, the disease represented no particular danger to India. ”Only 4 percent of cases are fatal and we have had no cases in this country anyway,” he said.

Inbound passengers at New Delhi’s international airport are surprised to see no particular sign of concern by airport staff who, as usual wear neither masks nor gloves. ”This is risky,” commented Ramanathan who arrived here from Singapore a few days ago.

Anjan Das, who arrived in eastern Kolkata city’s international airport with a cough and a fever five days ago, was released from an isolation ward on Friday after being certified that he did not suffer from SARS.

Officials at Air India, the national carrier, said however that in accordance with guidelines from the Health Ministry a special training programme for airline crew would begin from Saturday. The airline has already limited its flights to Hong Kong to three per week.

At the Patel Chest Institute, which has special facilities to tackle respiratory ailments, Prof. V K Vijayan says there is very little to be done until the causative virus or bacteria is identified. ”The simple fact is that any infection of the respiratory tract, if left untreated, can result in pneumonia,” said Vijayan, who is director of the Institute and has several internationally acknowledged research papers to his credit.

While official reaction to SARS bordered on the sceptical, non-government organisations (NGOs) working in the health sector have expressed suspicions, despite the WHO warnings, that the danger from what appeared to them to be ordinary seasonal influenza was being hyped up.

”The only mystery about SARS is why a needless scare being kicked up,” said Purushottaman Mulloli of the Joint Action Council (JAC), which analyses international health campaigns. ”This SARS contagion looks too much like the Asian economic contagion right down to facts like it is mostly affecting East Asia, is not affecting India and is causing a financial crisis,” Mulloli commented.

At the Voluntary Health Association of India, Dr Mira Shiva said the case definition issued by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) was vague and talks about a fever higher than 38.4 degrees Celsius, shortness of breath, coughing and breathing difficulty in anyone who has recently been in Asia.

”With a case definition like that thousands of Indians would have to be sent to isolation wards for suspected SARS,” Shiva, an internationally known campaigner for the rational use of pharmaceutical drugs and better health policies, said.

”To me the undue interest of the CDC in SARS and in China’s Guangdong province alone is intriguing – the Chinese authorities are naturally suspicious and not too keen to let CDC teams in,” she said.

Dr Kalyan Banerjee, one of India’s foremost medical scientists and former director of National Institute of Virology, agreed that the CDC case definition later adopted by WHO was vague. ”Too many diseases carry those symptoms.”

”All this hype is reminiscent of the 1984 outbreak of a mystery disease in Surat which was erroneously attributed to pneumonic plague but was scientifically never proven to be that,” he said.

The supposed plague, which claimed 47 lives, spread terror in Surat. from where people fled by the thousands to other cities where people quickly took to wearing masks – unlike in present times when the SARS virus has left the public completely indifferent.

Economic losses caused by the plague scare exceeded a billion dollars, including those from the cancellation of airline and hotel bookings and the ban by several countries of flights originating from India.

SARS too has begun taking a toll of the hotel and hospitality industry in India. Said Rakesh Kumar an agent for Travel and Tours Services, a tour operator: ”Naturally we are concerned by the loss of business and we hope this bug will be sorted out soon.”

Among those troubled by SARS are the organisers of BangaloreBio 2003, an international biotechnology event scheduled to be held in the southern city of Bangalore from Apr 15- 17.

”There have already been a few cancellations by key speakers, but most of the 40 speakers from foreign countries, particularly Europe are likely to attend,” said Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, one of the organisers. She said most of the cancellations were from Asia.