The Hindu : Early warning system on epidemics on the anvil

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 08, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka

Early warning system on epidemics on the anvil

Bangalore Jan. 7. The satellite-based Geographic Information Systems will be used to map endemic infectious diseases in the country as a first step towards preventing epidemics, Nirmal Kumar Ganguly, Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research, has said.

The idea was to create a countrywide early warning system on outbreaks of diseases such as malaria, influenza, measles, and so on, Dr. Ganguly said at the inauguration of an Indo-U.S. Symposium on "Infectious disease research and development" here on Tuesday. In the long-term, this would help prevent outbreaks, and in the medium-term contain the outbreak from becoming a full-blown epidemic. ICMR was setting up the "epidemiological infrastructure" into which the GIS based disease map would plug in, he said. In collaboration with research institutions, ICMR would build "sequencing and tele-epidemiology facilities and repositories" for major disease causing germs. At the primary level, "surveillance systems" with health workers, doctors and so on, recording and reporting online, incidence of the diseases would be set up. In time, data collected this way would help generate information on where the diseases were prevalent. Such work was in progress for measles, influenza, tuberculosis and HIV.

As more data was compiled, computer-based mathematical modelling would be used to "trace vectors... sometimes even in house clusters," he said. A surveillance system for tuberculosis was being set up in 600 districts with the help of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 200 districts had been covered, he said.

Delegates for the five-day symposium had come from leading Indian research institutions, the Defence Research Development Organisation, and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institutes of Health and Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Major-General Lester Martinez-Lopez, Commanding-General of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, said the U.S. and India were discussing co-operation in the development of vaccines for malaria and dengue. Dr. Ganguly said India had developed, "at an affordable price", a drug for Kala Azar disease, called Miltofotene.