The Government on Thursday trashed the alarmist report by the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that the recent swine flu virus in India has acquired mutations that makes it more dangerous than previously circulating strains of H1N1 influenza.
Pune-based National Institute of Virology (NIV), a research institute under the Union Health Ministry, said there was no evidence to suggest that the swine flu virus in India may have mutated. The denial came in response to the study by the MIT conducted by a team of Indian-origin scientists which said swine flu virus has acquired mutations that make it more dangerous than previously circulating strains of H1N1 influenza.
According to the latest figures from the Health Ministry, 50 more deaths took the swine flu toll close to the 1,600-mark while nearly 28,000 people have been infected. However, scientists at the NIV in Pune refuted the claims saying the genetic analysis of the H1N1 isolates from the present 2015 outbreak do not show any such mutations as mentioned in the MIT publication.
The observation in the MIT report was based on gene sequence analysed for the H1N1 virus taken from a database and not from actual virus isolates from the current 2015 outbreak, they said. “A recent paper in the Cell Host Microbes 2015 has speculated possible enhanced virulence of the 2015 H1N1 strains circulating in India. This observation is based on HA gene sequence analysed for the H1N1 virus A/India/6427/2014 taken from a database and not from actual virus isolates from the current 2015 outbreak,” the scientists elaborated.
The genetic analysis of the HA gene of the H1N1 isolates from the present 2015 outbreak do not show any such mutations as mentioned in the publication, they said in an official statement. Moreover, the strain mentioned in the report of 2014 has no relevance to the current outbreak of 2015. Recently, NIV has analysed six full genomes, which also suggests absence of such mutations, said NIV scientists. The MIT researchers in the study claimed that the recent Indian strains carry new mutations in the hemagglutinin protein that are known to make the virus more virulent.