Two-year-old swine flu patient recovers before testing positive

By IANS,

Bhopal : A two-year-old girl here has tested positive for swine flu, becoming the first confirmed case in the city, but doctors Wednesday said she recovered before the test result was received, 12 days after the sample was sent.


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Doctors at Gandhi Medical College (GMC) here said Ananya Shrivastava had already recuperated completely and neither her parents nor other relatives had shown any signs of the influenza H1N1 infection.

The National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) report on Ananya was received at the Swine Flu Control Room here late Tuesday. She is the first patient to have tested positive for the virus in Bhopal and the third in Madhya Pradesh. In all cases, the patients had recuperated before the reports came in.

“My child is now keeping well and is in good health,” said V.K. Shrivastava, Ananya’s father. “She was administered medicines for normal fever and cold and has improved without medicines prescribed for swine flu.”

Doctors at the State Swine Flu Control Room said the girl was admitted to GMC Aug 13 with flu-like symptoms. Her samples were sent for tests the same day and the result was received Tuesday evening, after 12 days.

They, however, pointed out that the girl recovered after initial treatment and was sent home after a couple of days. She and her parents are keeping well and the girl is now totally asymptomatic.

B.N. Chouhan from the state’s health department said the child, though well, was still under observation. “A team of doctors visited the girl’s house Tuesday night to carry out more investigations and conduct another check-up on her and her parents to ensure they were actually healthy and had no swine flu symptoms,” he added.

Doctors said the girl possibly contracted swine flu through some relatives from Pune who had visited her parents’ house in Bhopal during the festival of Raksha Bandhan.

Till now 79 samples have been sent from Madhya Pradesh and three of them have tested positive for swine flu.

It is suspected that 17-year-old Upendra Yadav, who died in Gwalior on Sunday, succumbed to swine flu, but his test results are still awaited.

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