Twenty-nine-year-old Santosh Ramchandra Narute of Wagholi died of swine flu at Sassoon hospital on Sunday. He is the 97 th swine flu fatality in the city.

Narute, a resident of Katkewadi in Wagholi, was admitted to Mate hospital in Wagholi on October 29. He was later shifted to Sassoon General Hospital on October 30. He complained of acute respiratory distress syndrome and was put on ventilator. He died at 2 pm on Sunday.

Meanwhile, five patients from Pimpri Chinchwad area are in the intensive care unit and one is on ventilator at Yashwantrao Chavan Memorial Hospital. Five other patients have been kept in isolation wards, said Dr Rajshekhar Iyer, PCMC medical director.

He said that a total of 3,19,121 people from the twin township have been examined till date. Out of these, 86,484 had flu-like symptoms, and 3,861 were administered Tamiflu. As on Sunday, 10 persons have succumbed to swine flu from Pimpri-Chinchwad, while 233 were tested positive.

With the city registering the largest number of swine flu victims in the country, a heavily burdened healthcare apparatus is banking on development of herd immunity to combat the pandemic.

Confronted with an unrelenting spread of the virus in urban, semi-urban and rural areas in and around Pune that saw its first swine flu fatality on August 3, the state health authorities are eagerly awaiting the findings of a research undertaken by the National Institute of Virology (NIV) on herd immunity.

While NIV, the sole designated agency for testing the H1N1 infection, has not come out with any official word on its survey, health department sources said the findings appear to be encouraging.