BHUBANESWAR: Health and Family Welfare Minister Pradip Amat said Odisha is a model State in the country for its pioneering efforts in extending most advanced haematology services and first in the world to provide bone marrow transplant facilities free of cost.
Addressing the inaugural session of third Global Congress on Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) here on Wednesday, Amat said the State Government is providing free facilities for diagnosis and treatment of SCD, Thalassemia, haemophilia and blood cancer patients, besides free blood supply to these patients. SCD is a major health problem in southern and western Odisha, he added.
Discussing the challenges facing Chhattisgarh, Health and Family Welfare Minister of the neighbouring State Ajay Chandrakar said the kind of awareness required for the disease is lacking everywhere.
"We have started a programme for screening SCD from 2007. Of 2.6 crore population of Chhattisgarh, 30 lakh suffer from blood disorder. Our Government is coming up with a centre of excellence to impart training and provide consultation and treatment,’’ he said.
Director of National Health Mission (NHM) and Additional Secretary of Union Health Ministry Arun Panda said the Government of India has urged Global Sickle Cell Disease Network to forward recommendations of the third Global Congress on the disease which can help formulate a national programme to tackle the problem.
As many as 11 States have taken advantage of NHM for counselling and screening of SCD and it is hoped that others will follow suit, he said and added that the Centre has decided that non-communicable diseases need to be looked into more carefully as 60 per cent of morbidity and mortality are from non-communicable diseases.
Medical Director of Global Sickle Cell Disease Network Prof Isaac Odame said over a thousand babies are born with SCD every day and of them, less than 50 are detected at the age of two months. The majority of them may die if undetected.
‘’Many people who suffer from the disease are poor, marginalised and unreachable. We have to understand the social context of the disease and take the cultural and socio-economical condition of people into consideration before treating the disease,’’ he said.
Among others, Health Secretaries of Odisha and Chhattisgarh Dr Pramod Meherda and Subrat Sahoo, president of Odisha Haematology Niranjan Tripathy, Dean of SCB Medical College Sidhharth Das and organising secretary Rabindra Kumar Jena also spoke.