The virtues of Swine Flu

The death of 14 year old Reeda Sheikh has been a rude awakener for the lax health care and government officials. The emergency mode has now been activated meaning that a few hospitals, doctors and quarantine sectors have been put up in a jiffy and news channels are constantly blaring smallest tit-bits about Swine Flu and the H1N1 virus.Yet again, we seem to have missed the point. In hackneyed words, we are still treating the diseased and not the disease. We are still curing the outbreak instead of preventing it. As a nation we are woefully short of a plan, a policy to handle such outbreaks.

For starters, lets put up with two facts: Swine Flu is spreading fast. However, it is treatable. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome had a mortality rate 15 times that of swine flu. The Flu’s death rate estimate is 1%. Health officials point out that many more die from regular flu.

However a proper response to pandemic or in imagined worst case scenario of Bioterrorism is still missing. Widespread closures, isolation, quarantines are ineffective and impractical. It does-not solve the problem and instead ends up hurting the economic engine.

The focus of the health care systems in India would have to be:
1.Testing and Early detection: It would need to open emergency testing sites outside/away hospital areas with the equipment and manpower to administer early detection. Doing it away from the regular hospitals is imperative, to dis-allow infections to spread through people who already have medical complications.
2.Adequate stockpiles of drugs necessary to treat the virus strain are necessary.
3.Complete treatment should be taken up to prevent mutations of the strain which could render the present medications ineffective.
4.The mass media channels spread more mis-information than information. The government and the health care officials would have to tap this media to educate and disseminate information within the people.
5.One needs a SOP, disaster management system and a properly documented process documented on “how to” deal with such pandemics. This would categorize the “class” of the outbreak and who/how to mobilize support in face of such outbreaks.

Thus, in the whole, Swine Flu should serve as a template for the government to check on its emergency response systems to such outbreaks.