Go to classes but don't party, Azad tells students

As H1N1 (swine flu) deaths in the country touched seven with the demise of a child in Chennai, the Government today decided to finally authorise private testing and has readied a band of top bureaucrats to work with each state government to identify hospitals, government and private, which can be used for dealing with the outbreak.

Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad dismissed the idea of shutting schools and colleges to contain the spread. He said this wouldn’t solve the problem; children and adults have to show restraint by staying away from public gatherings, parties and functions rather than shutting institutions. If students stay away from school or colleges and then attend parties or other public gatherings, what use is the closure of schools, he asked, adding that self-restraint was needed, especially when one is slightly ill. He said he would leave it to state governments and the institutions themselves to decided if they should close or not.

Today, Pune civic authorities announced closure of all schools and colleges, while in Thane, near Mumbai, all schools were closed for a week. At least seven schools in Delhi today announced closure, either partially or for a full week.

Azad told the media today after a long meeting at the ministry, attended by the cabinet secretary, that the government has decided to import an additional 22,000 testing kits for H1N1, besides buying 20 million tablets of Tamiflu, the antidote.

The reagent needed for testing is available with a single company in the US and hence these kits have to be imported to conduct tests in India. He said the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) was working on creating an indigenous testing kit, which could bring down the testing costs considerably. At present, a single positive test costs Rs 10,000, while a negative test costs Rs 5,000.

So far, the government has been paying for the tests and has conducted 4,000. While there were just two testing centres in the beginning, in the course of a month and a half of the spread, the government has introduced testing for H1N1 in 16 other of its laboratories, Azad said.

“Now we have issued guidelines to state governments which are to be used as a basis for identifying eligible private testing laboratories for conducting tests in future,” he said. The meeting today also decided to send an additional secretary and joint secretary from each of the 33 ministries of the Centre to every state to monitor the situation on the ground, besides personally helping in identifying hospitals and testing centres for the disease.