Swine-flu’s rising toll—624 deaths had been recorded by February 16—is indeed concerning, but far from the epidemic scale that would require a war-like response like compulsory stocking of oseltamivir, or Tamiflu, the drug that is used to treat the air-borne contagion, by chemists. But that is what the government has in mind. The Drug Controller General of India has directed 10,000 pharma outlets in the country to stock up on the drug to be sold only on prescription.
Access to the drug has to be better—there have been news reports of hospitals in Delhi, which has reported over 1,600 cases, unable to treat patients because they had run out of the drug. And that is exactly where the drug’s availability needs to be better. Asking pharmacies to stock up irrespective of demand seems more like coercion than part of a concerted response. Given containing contagion (and thereby, any possible epidemic) needs quarantining in hospitals. So, these should ideally be the loci of any stocking up of Tamiflu. As much as increasing access to the drug the government needs to focus on bolstering testing for the disease. In the most-affected states, Rajasthan and Gujarat, as well as in Delhi, there are just not enough labs, government-run or private to take on the sheer number of cases in which testing has been recommended. How scattered the government response really has been, though, is best gauged from the fact that Serum Institute in Pune had developed an indigenous vaccine, Nasovac, after the first outbreak of swine-flu some years ago, but had to dump the volumes its produced because the government showed no interest in picking it up.
