Hyderabad, India — Search engine titan Google Inc., pulled down the shutter of its center in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad for two days, after one its employees was confirmed to be suffering from the H1N1 swine-flu virus. Google said it has closed to examine the extent of the spread of the virus.
According to reports, the Google employee caught the virus from his friend who had been diagnosed positive on his return from Houston, US.
In fact, this friend had induced the first-ever cluster case in the country by transmitting on the infection to seven people, including technology workers of various companies. All seven have now been quarantined at the Government Chest Hospital, the nodal center for handling swine flu cases in Hyderabad.
Confirming the incident, a Google spokesperson said, “One of our contractual workers in Hyderabad has been tested positive with the H1N1 virus. He has been hospitalized and is under full medical care. As a precautionary measure, we have closed the concerned office in Hyderabad for two days, July 14 and 15, and are taking all necessary steps, including sanitizing of common areas, to protect our employees.”
Out of the 250 employees from this particular office of Google, 95 were sent to the AP General and Chest Hospital on Tuesday to receive the swine flu treatment. Of these, seven employees were diagnosed positive with swine flu symptoms and were quarantined even as Google office shut its office for two days for its premises to be sanitized.
Paroma Roy Chowdhury, a New Delhi-based spokeswoman for Google, declined to elaborate on the exact number of employees infected at the center, but sources said that efforts are on to get the employees of the company tested for the virus, which will reopen today.
“When this techie — who had arrived from Houston — was diagnosed positive on Sunday, the Google employee got himself admitted at Chest hospital. He tested positive on Monday,” said Dr K Subhakar, the H1N1 Influenza nodal center coordinator. Dr Subhakar then contacted Google HR to find out if the employee had visited the office in the last couple of days after coming in contact with the infected techie. As it turned out, he had been to office on two days. “We then asked Google to screen the close contacts of this employee and send them to Chest Hospital,” Dr Subhakar said. This resulted in 95 people visiting the hospital to undergo the test. While some were sent by the company, others were generally worried about having contracted the infection.
However, Dr Subhakar said that there was no need for any company to shut down. “They just have to screen people, be proactive and send only those with symptoms to the hospital,” Dr Subhakar said, who is currently handling calls from various IT firms seeking his appointments for a video-conference with their employees on swine flu awareness.
Google’s workforce in India is among the largest outside the U.S., Ms. Chowdhury said. Except Google, no other company has officially committed to the infection entering their campuses so far.
Google operates engineering, support and on-line sales services at its Hyderabad facility, which is considered to be the life-line of the company since it handles queries from English-speaking countries, particularly the US.
In the meantime, three more case has been recorded to be tested positive for swine flu on Tuesday, taking the Hyderabad’s statistic of the infection to 34. These cases include a 35-year-old woman, a software professional who flew down to the city from Florida on Sunday, a 29-year-old techie who came to the city from Sydney and a 28-year-old businessman from Hyderabad had gone to Thailand for work.
The total tally of swine flu patients countrywide is over 200. The results of 21 more suspect cases are still awaited.
According to figures released bythe Geneva-based World Health Organization, which stated that as of July 6, the number of people confirmed as having been contracted by the H1N1 swine flu strain of influenza in India was 129. The total number of cases worldwide was 94,512 as of that date.