BANGALORE: Health Ministers of the southern States will be conferring here on July 30 on ways to check the spread of chikungunya which threatens to assume epidemic proportions.

Minister for Health and Family Welfare R. Ashok told presspersons here on Monday that the objective of holding the conference was to exchange notes on tackling the disease, which is stated to have spread from foreign countries. The conference was a collective effort to seek the Centre's guidelines and financial assistance, he said. The Government had been making efforts to contain the disease which was spreading fast in rural areas. Besides allopathic medicines, it had been supplying Ayurvedic, Unani and homoeopathy medicines to the affected areas on demand. Besides medicines, the State was fighting the disease with only 888 fogging machines. As the machines would come in handy in fighting similar water borne and fly borne diseases such as malaria, the Government was planning to provide them to each of the 5,400 village panchayats. Although the Government had to incur huge expenditure on providing fogging machines to all village panchayats as each of them would cost Rs. 25,000, it would be a one-time investment. Following the preventive measures taken up on a war-footing, the districts of Bellary, Raichur, Gulbarga and Bidar were now free from the disease to the extent of 90 per cent. The Government had spent Rs. 8.40 crore on controlling and preventing the disease. It recently appointed 300 doctors on contract basis to fight the disease, he added.

On the regular supply of medicines to rural health units, he said that all primary health centres, taluk and district hospitals would receive medicines in advance to meet the demand for three months as against the earlier procedure of waiting to exhaust the supplied medicines on a monthly basis. On the alleged import of a drug by Biocon instead of manufacturing it in its units, he said that the Centre was yet to respond to the State's complaint.

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