BHUBANESWAR: Bhubaneswar will soon have a metropolitan health surveillance centre to keep a tab on future pandemics and communicable diseases. It is one of the 20 cities of the country selected by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.The metropolitan disease surveillance centre will conduct research and forecast epidemic prone diseases like dengue, chikungunya, scrub typhus, leptospirosis and Zika virus before its outbreak.
The state government has decided to set up the centre on the premises of the proposed regional branch of National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), for which it had provided 3.125 acre of land at Andharua Mouza under Bhubaneswar tehsil in Khurda district.
“The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) was initially asked to identify a piece of land for the surveillance centre in the city. As the BMC failed to provide, it has been decided that the centre will function from the NCDC building,” said a Health department official.
The centre to be set up under the Prime Minister Atmanirbhar Swasth Bharat Yojana’ (PMASBY) scheme and will work in tandem with the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) unit of the National Health Mission, state government laboratories, Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC) and the civic authorities.
The centre will be part of a nation-wide IT enabled disease surveillance network of laboratories at district, regional and national levels in metropolitan areas. It will strengthen health units at the points of entry for effectively detecting and combating public health emergencies and disease outbreaks.
“As a post-Covid initiative, the centre will initially function for five years. It will facilitate timely recognition of the early warning signals and institution of effective public health measures to curb the diseases. Though the centre is expected to start functioning from January next year, it will take a few more months to get operationalised in Bhubaneswar,” the health official said.