{"id":34790,"date":"2018-10-31T13:20:21","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T07:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=34790"},"modified":"2018-10-31T13:20:21","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T07:50:21","slug":"the-cold-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/the-cold-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"The cold facts:\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/todays-paper\/tp-opinion\/the-cold-facts\/article19793514.ece\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The cold facts<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Context:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ever since the influenza virus known as H1N1 ushered in India on 2009 pandemic, outbreaks have been an annual occurrence. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But India\u2019s surveillance systems are poor and underestimate the influenza burden substantially.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>How accurate are these official figures in India?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The problem with these official figures is that they only capture H1N1 numbers, a practice that has been adopted in response to the severity of the 2009 pandemic. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But influenza was present in India even before 2009 in the form of H3N2 and Influenza B virus types<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Out of these, H3N2 is capable of causing outbreaks as big as H1N1, and yet India does not track H3N2 cases as extensively as it does H1N1.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A surveillance project for acute febrile illnesses, anchored at the Manipal Centre for Virus Research in Karnataka, has found that influenza accounts for nearly 20% of fevers across rural areas in 10 Indian States fevers that are often undiagnosed and classified as mystery-fevers. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All this indicates that India\u2019s surveillance systems are significantly poor.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What are the consequences of these inaccurate figures?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As of 2015, India submits a woefully small number of H1N1 genetic sequences to global open-access databases for a country of its size and population. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sequencing is important because it can detect mutations in genetic material that help the virus evade human immune systems, making it more deadly. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because India does not sequence a large enough sample of viral genomes, it would be missing mutations that could explain changes in the lethality of the virus.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The cold facts:\u00a0 Context: Ever since the influenza virus known as H1N1 ushered in India on 2009 pandemic, outbreaks have been an annual occurrence. But India\u2019s surveillance systems are poor and underestimate the influenza burden substantially. How accurate are these official figures in India? The problem with these official figures is that they only capture&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/the-cold-facts\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The cold facts:\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704801408},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}