Mumbai: The outbreak of bird flu at a poultry farm in a village outside Imphal in Manipur has brought into focus India’s preparedness - or lack of it - in dealing with a pandemic.
The current episode of avian influenza is local and there have been no reports of human infection yet, but health-care experts are worried that the country’s hospitals are ill-prepared to grapple with any future epidemic-like situation.
For the record, the government has stocks of nearly 950,000 capsules of oseltamivir, a generic copy of Roche’s Tamiflu, the only drug available for treating bird flu, from a purchase it made last year when the bird flu virus appeared in parts of central and western India. That stockpile is enough to treat about 100,000 patients. (Roche is the pharmaceuticals division of F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd.)
In addition, each of the three drug firms approved to manufacture oseltamivir in India - Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, Cipla Ltd and Hyderabad’s Hetero Drugs Ltd - have an inventory of a few million dosages, estimates Amar Lulla, managing director of Cipla.
This amount lags global preparedness benchmarks, such as those set out by the World Health Organization, which recommends countries prepare to deal with as much as a quarter of their population affected by the virus.
Several countries, including the US, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, China, Kazakhstan and Thailand, have already stockpiled at least 10-14 million courses of anti-viral drugs.
The three Indian companies could be asked to produce more capsules, maintains Drug Controller General of India M. Venkateswarlu, adding that “we can approve more manufacturers now as the patent restriction has been removed for this drug now”.
Health-care experts still say that India’s preparedness to face a bird flu outbreak is grossly inadequate as the government is yet to act in some of the key areas such as crisis management, medicines and vaccines procurement and distribution, technology upgradation for instant identification of the virus.
The government, for instance, is yet to set up emergency-care cells manned with trained medical and para-medical staff in all health care and local administration departments despite global alerts.
For instance, it took almost three weeks for the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory at Bhopal to confirm the virus after the outbreak was first reported in Manipur on 7 July. Following which, the Centre deputed its rapid response team to review and firm up preparedness measures on 26 July. The Union health ministry airlifted drugs and protective gear the same day.