Patna to get surveillance centre for communicable diseases

As a post-Covid initiative, the Centre had selected Patna among 20 cities in India to set up a metropolitan surveillance centre for communicable diseases, initially for five years.

Rajaghat in Patna has been selected among 20 locations in India to host Bihar’s lone metropolitan surveillance centre for communicable diseases, officials familiar with the matter said.

NDRF personnel sanitize an area in Patna during Covid-19 lockdown. (HT archive)

The government’s target is to make the centre functional by January next year.

The metropolitan disease surveillance centre, proposed and supported by the Centre, will conduct research and forecast epidemic prone diseases like dengue, chikungunya, scrub typhus, leptospirosis and Zika virus before its outbreak, said the officials quoted above.

“Its objective is to strengthen the disease surveillance mechanism in large urban areas, including municipal corporations. This will facilitate timely recognition of the early warning signals and institution of effective public health measures to curb these,” said Dr Ranjeet Kumar, state surveillance officer and also the nodal officer of the state health department for the programme.

The Centre will extend financial support for five years after which the established activities shall continue under the state support. “The funds earmarked could be utilised for recruiting and training of manpower, procuring testing kits, laboratory, media, transportation, developing surveillance tools and related logistics,” says a letter from Rajesh Bhushan, secretary, union ministry of health and family welfare, which has been seen by HT.

As a post-Covid initiative, the Centre had selected Patna among 20 cities in India to set up a metropolitan surveillance centre for communicable diseases, initially for five years.

The metropolitan surveillance centre will work in tandem with the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) unit of the National Health Mission and the civic authorities, said health officials.

The centre will have a nine-member team of experts, including epidemiologist and entomologist, besides having phlebotomist for sample collection.

“We have allotted space for the metropolitan surveillance centre. The state health department now has to undertake the renovation work after which a Central team will come to assess it. We hope to get the centre functional early next year, after the renovation work of our building is complete,” said Dr Zeba Nahid, assistant medical officer and also the nodal officer for the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC).

Dr Nahid said the scourge of dengue, which began in August, had ebbed considerably, with barely 10-20 positive case being reported on a daily basis in Patna, as against 200-plus in November.

The 20 locations identified by the Centre for the metropolitan surveillance centre include Guwahati (Assam), Delhi, Ahmedabad (Gujarat), Chandigarh and Gurgaon (both in Haryana), Shimla (Himachal Pradesh), Bangalore (Karnataka), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), Pune, Thane, Mumbai and Nagpur (all in Maharashtra), Bhubaneswar (Odisha), Jaipur (Rajasthan), Hyderabad (Telangana), Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Lucknow and Agra (both in Uttar Pradesh) and Kolkata in West Bengal.