HYDERABAD: Vice President and Chairman of Rajya Sabha M Venkaiah Naidu was on Tuesday briefed regarding the need to set up a sewage and air surveillance system in Parliament to find the prevalence of COVID-19 by the Director-General of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr Shekhar C Mande.
The CSIR head was accompanied by the Directors of Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Dr Rakesh Mishra and Dr S Chandrasekhar, respectively.
Dr Mande informed the Vice President that sewage surveillance provides qualitative as well as quantitative estimate of the number of people infected in a population and could be used to understand the progression of Covid-19 even when mass scale tests for individuals are not possible.
He presented data of the sewage surveillance carried out in Hyderabad, Prayagraj, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur, Puducherry and Chennai. Naidu complimented the scientists for their work and assured them that he would discuss the issue with the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and the Central government.
Venkaiah to take up issue
Venkaiah complimented the scientists for their work and assured them that he would discuss the issue with the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and the Central government