MADURAI: The State Health Department is all set to establish a state-level isolation/quarantine facility at Chennai and three regional-level isolation/quarantine facilities at Madurai, Coimbatore and Thanjavur districts, to isolate, test and treat patients during future epidemic outbreaks.
CM’s announcement last year
Last year, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami had announced that to curb the spread of infectious diseases – Covid-19, swine flu, bird flu and SARS – a state-level isolation facility would be established at the Government Hospital of Thoracic Medicine at Tambaram Sanatorium (Chennai), three regional-level isolation facilities at the Government Hospital of Thoracic Medicine at Thoppur (Madurai district), Government Coimbatore Medical College Hospital (Coimbatore district) and Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Tuberculosis Sanatorium (Thanjavur district). Apart from this, a laboratory at the King Institute of Preventive Medicine and Research (Chennai) would also be upgraded to Biosafety level III at a total cost of Rs 110 crore.
Recent G.O. on Madurai facility
Following the announcement, the State government, in an order (G.O.) dated January 25, sanctioned a sum of Rs 12 crore for setting up an exclusive isolation/quarantine facility at the Government Hospital of Thoracic Medicine in Thoppur here. While Rs 10 crore was allotted for the construction of a new building, within the hospital premises, Rs 2 crore was earmarked for the procurement of 17 kinds of testing and treatment equipment, including high-end ventilators, defibrillators, a RT-PCR machine, an ELISA reader, and cell counters.
Why exclusive isolation centres?
Commenting on the state-wide move, a highly-placed official in the State Health Department told TNIE that the dedicated isolation facilities were being established to ramp up the preparedness of the healthcare system to tackle epidemic outbreaks in future.The Superintendent of the Government Hospital of Thoracic Medicine at Tambaram Sanatorium, Dr R Sridhar, said that many decades ago when sea-travel was predominant, the Communicable Diseases Hospital at Tondiarpet was built near Chennai harbour to isolate sea passengers during an epidemic outbreak. With changing times, as air travel has become popular, four new isolation facilities are being set up particularly for air travellers, he added.
More about the facilities
“The exclusive isolation/quarantine centres are to have individual rooms equipped with exhaust facilities and air-borne infection-control measures. The centres would also have laboratories to carry out in-house microbiological investigation and equipment for critical care. The state-level isolation/quarantine facility at Tambaram Sanatorium would have 150-200 beds,” Dr Sridhar shared.