The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Steps to combat infectious diseases

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Friday, Dec 14, 2007
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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Steps to combat infectious diseases

Staff Reporter

Draft action plan formulated

Thiruvananthapuram: A draft action plan for the State for the prevention, management and follow-up studies of emerging infectious diseases, with a special focus on chikungunya, was formulated at a high-level academic session held here on Thursday.

The session was held as a run up to the national work shop on management of chikungunya being organised by the Department of Health and the National Rural Health Mission at Kochi on December 28.

The Union Health Ministry has already laid down fresh guidelines for the prevention and management of dengue fever and chikungunya.

However, the Ministry has asked each State to come up with its own guidelines and strategies, with a focus on regional differences like geographic and climatic factors which have a bearing on the control and prevention of most vector-borne infectious diseases.

Kerala has thus become the first State to take up this initiative by getting together resource persons from across the country, including Health Department officials, medical professionals, researchers, scientists from institutions and representatives from traditional and alternative medicine systems like Ayurveda and homoeopathy.

Senior Health Department officials, medical professionals from the government sector and medical colleges – including experts from departments like community medicine, physical medicine, general medicine, nephrology, paediatrics, microbiology and dermatology – and officials from various national institutes took part in Thursday’s session.

Several doctors who had worked in the chikungunya-affected districts during the last two epidemics and several researchers too shared their experiences at the meeting.

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