Residents of Jharsuguda district’s Belpahar town are in panic now as a local trader was on Wednesday found infected with H1N1 (swine flu) after undergoing treatment for over a week.
The businessman, Mukesh Agarwal, suffered from fever and cough on April 25. Suspecting that he had a sunstroke, family members took him to a private hospital on the day. As his condition deteriorated, he was admitted in the Jahangir Gandhi Hospital at Belpahar on April 27. When no improvements marked, he was then shifted to a private nursing home at Burla and then to a private hospital at Bhubaneswar. At Bhubaneswar hospital, doctors found that Mukesh was infected by H1N1 virus.
With spreading of the news, the Belpahar citizens are now living in a state of fear. On Wednesday, a team of doctors comprising Dr Ratnakar Choudhury and Dr Manoj Pati met the patient’s family members to ascertain the actual reasons of the disease. However, they didn’t find any swine flu symptom in other members of Mukesh’ family.
Dr Choudhury said health workers would be moving door to door to verify the reasons. He said all preventive medicines are available in the hospital and would be supplied to people soon.
locals have alleged that they are living in an unhygienic condition due to piling of garbage all over the town. Pigs are moving to these garbage places carrying swine flu virus.
While Belpahar Citizen Forum member Syam Sundar Satpathy said sweeping is not being done regularly, municipality EO loknath Tiwari assured that a large scale sweeping operation would be taken up at the old petrol pump at Belpahar from Thursday onwards.