New Delhi: The total number of persons suspected to have been infected by the H1N1 virus in India has risen to 42 with four more positive cases have been confirmed in Delhi and three in Bangalore on Thursday.
The four new cases in the National Capital have been quarantined at the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. Out of the four, one had returned from the USA, one from Japan while the remaining two are from Delhi.
Three cases of human to human transmission have been reported from Delhi. However, there is some good news though with six of the 14 patients in Delhi being discharged.
Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, however, said that the presence of swine flu in the country was "negligible".
"The presence of H1N1 virus is very negligible in the country...While the US, whose population is about one fourth of ours, has recorded around 18,000 cases of swine flu and 45 deaths, in India only 35 cases have been reported so far," Azad was quoted as saying by PTI.
Six hospitals have been identified for treating swine flu affected people in the capital, Delhi Health Minister Kiran Walia said.
In Karnataka a South Korean and a Thai national tested positive for swine flu on Thursday taking the total number of cases in the state to five.
The two men arrived from South Korea and Bangkok respectively at the Bengaluru International Airport on June 14 and were sent to National Institute of Virology (NIV) Pune, health officials told PTI.
Earlier, a 29 year-old woman, her four year-old child and another passenger who arrived at BIA from San Francisco tested positive. They were being treated at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases, the officials said.
Two baby girls, aged one-and-a-half and eight months, who arrived from Singapore and Dubai, were quarantined at the Institute on Thursday with suspected symptoms of swine flu and their samples were sent for tests, they said.
In Hyderabad an eight-year-old boy, who arrived from New York early this week, tested positive for swine flu on Thursday, taking the total number of cases in the city to 14.
Five fresh cases of suspected swine flu have been reported in Pune during the last two days.
A family of three comprising a 30-year-old woman and her two children who arrived from Singapore were among the five persons admitted to a hospital in Pune. The remaining two cases were that of two young men coming here from the US.
Two suspected cases have been reported from Akola in Maharashtra and Ahmedabad.
With most of the swine flu affected people coming from the US, the government said that country should on its own start screening outbound passengers for symptoms of the disease.
New Delhi has also asked the developed countries to take action to check the spread of swine flu at their end.
(With inputs from PTI)
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