Health officials review Acute Febrile Illness project at Manipal University

Manipal : Health officials from the Centre and 10 states are present here for the annual review meeting of the “Hospital based Acute Febrile Illness (AFI) Surveillance in India” conductedby Manipal Centre for Virus Research (MCVR), Manipal University is being held during. The meeting will be inaugurated by Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Secretaryto Govt. of India, Department of Health Research (DHR) and Director General, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India, live on Skype.

The meeting will be presidedover by Dr. H Vinod Bhat, Vice Chancellor of Manipal University. The review meeting will bring together more than 50 health officials from across the country, including Central and State Government health officials from 10 states where the project has been implemented in the last year.

The project was initiated in June 2014, by MCVR in collaboration with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, USA and the respective State Health Department sunder the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), with an objective to generate evidence for public health action.

Manipal University has been successful in extending credible support to the disease surveillance of the country through this platform by providing case based real time surveillance data, thereby generating evidence for public health action.

The project envisaged to cover at least 10 states. The project was first implemented in Shimoga district of Karnataka in June 2014 and the latest being Koraput district of Odisha in September 2016. As of date it has been implemented in 27 sentinel hospitals distributed across 13 districts of 10 states including Karnataka, Kerala, Assam, Goa, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Tripura, Tamil Nadu and Odisha in close coordination and collaboration with the respective state health services. The project has provided diagnostic services to more than 13000 cases till date, from all the states together. Data from these sites are shared with national, state and district health officials on a daily basis.

The meeting intends to review the activities carried out at the 27 sentinel hospitals included in the projects. The meeting also intends to look into the aspects of how the service has been beneficial to the patients, treating hospitals and the state disease surveillance systems for public health action.