The Hindu : National : Call for action plan to check fever outbreak in Kerala

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Saturday, Dec 29, 2007
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Call for action plan to check fever outbreak in Kerala

Staff Reporter

— Photo:Vipin Chandran

Minister for Health P.K. Sreemathy inaugurating the national workshop on Emerging Fevers with focus on Chikungunya in Kochi on Friday.

KOCHI: The public health system needs to evolve a sustainable model to avert and control fever outbreaks, said P.K. Sreemathy, Minister for Health. She was delivering the inaugural address at a national workshop on ‘Emerging Fevers’ with focus on chikungunya, here on Friday.

The large-scale outbreak of fever this year reported from many southern districts of the State had caught the Department of Health on the wrong foot. The outbreak of chikungunya in Alappuzha last year was more of less confined to the coastal region.

Ms. Sreemathy said the physicians had gained more experience over the last two years and this should be shared to formulate a preventive framework and draft an action plan to fight the menace. The channels of spread of diseases such as chikungunya should be understood to rganise control measures.

The State’s typical features of high density population, congenial situation favouring breeding of vectors such as mosquitoes, continuous movement of people from one place to another for job, etc., need to be taken into account while evolving control measures.

All inputs contributed by the other systems of medicine popular in our area should be integrated into the guidelines that can be evolved as a control measure, said Ms. Sreemathy. Research is of utmost importance in studying the disease causing organism and its mode of multiplication to evolve a strategy to counter the fever outbreak, she added.

Sebastian Paul, MP; K.V. Thomas, MLA; P.S. Shyla, district panchayat president; K. Shylaja, director, Health Services (in-charge); B. Ekbal, former Vice-Chancellor of Kerala University; P.V. Ramachandran, director, Medical Education; were among the dignitaries at the inaugural function.

Viswas Mehta, Secretary, Health, and chairman of the organising committee welcomed the gathering of experts from various medical research organisations in the country and the medical community from southern States. Dinesh Arora, director, National Rural Health Mission, read the message of Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss regarding the importance of a scientific dissemination on issues concerning the outbreak of disease. Dr. Arora also proposed a vote of thanks.

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