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The Union Health and Family Welfare Minister, Dr. A. Ramadoss today launched the Integrated Disease Surveillance Project here underlining the fact that the new scheme will bring about a sea change in understanding diseases patterns and monitoring risk factors for disease control and prevention. Speaking at the inaugural function, the Minister recalled his first day in office when the project was presented to him and said that this programme caught his imagination from the very start. This is a much needed programme which will enable notification of a disease in any part of the country within six hours of the outbreak. The Minister said that in course of time, the Disease Surveillance Project will be turned into a monitoring programme for monitoring and surveillance of health parameters and availability of doctors and facilities in the remote parts of the country.
Speaking on the occasion, the Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Mrs. P. Lakshmi said that this a project in which Govt. of India and the State Govts. will join hands to built capacities to detect and control outbreaks of common communicable diseases. The project is to be implemented by the States and Union Territories as per their needs though in a coordinated and uniform manner. This Project would basically enhance capacity of each district so that timely and effective intervention could be undertaken to control diseases. The Minister urged private hospitals and practitioners to provide relevant information on occurrence of diseases to the District Surveillance Unit so that outbreaks are identified at an early stage and many lives saved. She urged the media to play a proactive role in keeping a vigil on occurrence of diseases.
The IDSP is intended to be the backbone of public health delivery system in the country. It aims at establishing a system of surveillance for communicable and non-communicable diseases and the risk factors at the state level. It is also expected to provide essential data to monitor progress of ongoing disease control programmes and help allocate health resources more optimally. It will be able to detect early warning signals of impending outbreaks and help initiate an effective response in a timely manner.
This World Bank assisted project is being implemented at a total cost of Rs.408.36 crore and will cover all the States and UTs in a phased manner. Phase-I starting this year will cover the 9 States of Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttranchal, Mizoram and Tamil Nadu spread over 206 districts. In Phase-II, 176 districts will be covered in the States of Gujarat, Haryana, Rajasthan, Orissa, Chattisgarh, West Bengal, Delhi, Goa, Chandigarh, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura while the remaining 210 districts will be taken up in Phase-III. The diseases to be covered under the Project are most of the epidemic diseases such as Malaria, Cholera, Typhoid, Plague, TB, Polio and measles through regular weekly surveillance. In addition, road traffic accidents and unusual clinical symptoms such as meningeoencephalitis/hemorrhagic fever will also be included. In addition the States could potentially identify up to 5 States specific priority diseases for which public health response is required.
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