Click to play videoNew Delhi: The Government has done its best to contain the swine flu epidemic but the disease “had to spread and it will spread”, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has said.
“We have to a great extent not allowed this to spread but sooner or later it had to spread and it will spread. The only thing is we should not panic,” Azad told CNN-IBN on Sunday after the number of people infected with the disease in the country increased to 864.
Azad alleged people who had travelled aboard had brought “this gift” (swine flu) to the country. “The only advisory we could issue--if we could not stop anybody from coming--was that our people should not have gone. But despite our advisory people went and brought this gift from there,” he said in an interview.
“I do not know how many people have come to this country and gone back.” Azad advised people to shun “social functions” if they had even a few symptoms of the disease.
“I would recommend--not only to students--to all my countrymen that anybody who is suspicious of having some symptoms, he or she should not attend social functions,” he said.
Azad, earlier on Sunday, was forced to apologise to the family of a schoolgirl for saying that she could have spread the disease to other people by visiting more than one hospital.
"One small girl went from one hospital to another, then a third hospital to get treatment and then a fourth, without awareness. In the process some 80 people were infected. This girl transmitted the virus in the course of seeking treatment," he said in New Delhi.
The family of Pune schoolgirl Reeda Shaikh, who became India's first swine flu death victim on August 3, demanded that Azad either apologise for his remark or resign. Azad relented, saying he had not meant to hurt them.
The influenza A(H1NI) virus killed two more persons in the country on Sunday, taking the national toll in just a week to four and forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office to start monitoring the spread of the virus.
Three people continued to be in a critical condition and 82 fresh cases were reported, taking the total number of people infected by the virus to 864, the Health Ministry said.
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