India tightens swine flu advice

The Indian government is urging people not to travel abroad until swine flu in the country is under control, after seven more people tested positive.

India says it is fully equipped to deal with the disease/ Photo credit: AP

The new cases come from the Indian city of Jalandhar where a group of students had recently returned from a trip to the US space agency, NASA.

The total number of those infected by swine flu throughout India now stands at 30.

Doctors in Jalandhar city said the affected students are between 14 and 17 years of age. One of them had already tested positive over the weekend.

They were part of a group of 31 students and three teachers who returned over the weekend after a 10-day educational trip to NASA in the US.

Indian officials say they have tracked down eight people who were sitting near the group of students on the flight to Delhi from New York.

"They have been advised to watch for flu symptoms and take adequate precautions against possibly spreading the virus," an official said.

Federal health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has urged Indians, especially students, to put off travelling abroad until the flu is under control, the Press Trust of India reported.

"Till the disease is controlled globally, I would like to request young people from educational institutions going abroad that they can suspend their visits from the time being," he was quoted as saying.

As well as in Jalandhar, fresh cases of swine flu have also been detected in the southern cities of Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Earlier this month, India issued an alert against the flu and tightened screening for the virus at airports.

The government has said India is fully equipped to deal with the outbreak.

Pandemic can cripple poor countries

Earlier WHO chief Margaret Chan warned that the pandemic could cripple fragile health services in poor countries.

“Developing countries have the greatest vulnerability and the least resilience. They will be hit the hardest and take the longest to recover,” she told a UN forum on global health.

Last week,WHO raised its global alert to a maximum six, saying swine flu had reached pandemic status because of its geographical spread.

The virus, which was first detected in Mexico in April, has so far infected almost 30,000 people in 74 countries, according to the latest WHO figures. Around 150 of those have died.

“The pressures of a pandemic, on top of the rise in chronic diseases, could alone cripple fragile health services in the developing world,” Chan said.

While noting that the world’s preparedness for the pandemic was unprecedented, she stressed, “the level of preparedness, and the capacity to cope, are strongly biased toward wealthy countries.”

“In terms of measures to mitigate the health impact, many poor countries are virtually empty-handed,” the WHO director general said. “Even the use of non-pharmaceutical measures has limited relevance to poor countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.”

She added that “greater equity in the health status of populations, within and between countries should be regarded as a key measure of how we, as a civilised society, are making progress.”

Meanwhile UN chief Ban Ki-moon told the same forum that the world should put a greater focus on improving maternal health.

“I am most troubled by the costs of failed maternal and child health. The global impact of maternal and newborn deaths has been estimated at $15 billion a year in lost productivity,” he noted.

“We must use maternal health as a lens through which we decide and act on global health policies,“Ban said. “The international community should apply its valuable experience of fighting AIDS and malaria to saving mothers’ lives.”