Swine Flu and Helmet !

Finally swine flu reached here in my city too. When I mentioned death in my earlier blog, I had no idea that death in the form of H1N1 is going to visit my city.

The first H1N1 death here happened to be a teacher from my son’s school. This was a slight shock for many of us.

Is H1N1 that serious? I read lots of stuff and finally got fed up. The reality is no one exactly knows. This is because it’s said to be a new strain of virus. It will take some time to understand the virus and develop a proper vaccine (the vaccine just got developed is said to have some serious known and unknown side effects like paralysis or even death) There are doctors and experts who think that it’s not serious. And on the other side too stands a set of qualified doctors and experts who say it is serious. After all, those who died include medical doctors too.

There was this statistics showing normal flu death is more than H1N1 related one. Is that true? For me, it looked clever. Because in that representation, this particular strain [A( H1N1)] stands at one end and all other flu viruses stand at the other end as a single entity.

(There are lots of viruses that cause flu. Flu causeing viruses in human are mainly classified into Influenzavirus A, B and C. H1N1 is a subtype of Influenzavirus A. There are many other members in the same family like (H2N2 [caused Asian Flu), H3N2 [caused Hong Kong Flu], H5N1 [caused Bird Flu] etc). H stands for Hemagglutinin and N stands for Neuraminidase. These two are proteins found on the surface of the virus. H number and N number is assigned based on the structural form of these two proteins. The structure differes from strain to strain)

How is the government handling the issue? The government should be ashamed of themselves. One needs to understand that H1N1 came to India after many deaths in the Americas. India should have taken it seriously when we saw the reality that a country likes US had hundreds of victims. This is very important coz the US is a developed country and it has all the machineries to handle such issues where as India is a developing (since ages) country which do not have any such system to handle such emergencies.

The most stupid decision the government came out with was approving ONLY government hospitals to handle H1N1 cases. We all know what government hospitals are known for – dirtiness, lack of facilities, rude staff, lack of staff, no accountability, irresponsibility…. The Indian government should have taken a lesson from Philippines. They allowed major private hospitals to screen and admit H1N1 cases (India too did it at last, when things went worse).

What is the ‘cure’ for H1N1? Around the world, docs depended on one brand of anti-viral tablet – Tamiflu. What was the procedure to get Tamiflu in India? One need to get it confirmed by the labs, even if one had classical H1N1 flu symptoms. How long will it take to get it confirmed by the lab? Initially it took even 5 days. Most of the people who died here got the test result after their death ! (And the souls hesitated to take Tamiflu !; am kidding)

Why is this? Coz there were one or two labs who can do the test. At this point, the government needs to consider one thing. India has the second largest population in this world and keeping just one or two virology lab is ridiculous. This is more important than sending a mission to moon.

Yes, the government came out approving more labs and more hospitals when their initial facilities failed to meet the situation. When the death toll crossed 20, government came with a new norm for Tamiflu. Now the doctors can start the drug before the lab result arrives.

Is the government and the beaurocracy committed to people as they swear? When the government implemented the helmet rule, they said its for the safety of the people. What they wanted was to save people’s life !!! HAHAHA

Now that we got a chance to see how the government and beaurocracy love their people. Why is it so?

Its all coz of the thrash politicians and their system.