Over 2 dozen new infectious diseases emerge; India ups disease surveillance

More than two dozen new infectious disease-causing bugs have emerged in india during the last 30 years.

Adding to this, several infectious diseases, which were considered as vanished years ago, have been re-emerging in India with more force, according to the health authorities in India.

Several disease causing strains of virus and bacteria are emerging in different parts of the country. And the pathogens which cause communicable diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, cholera, chikunguya etc are either turning resistant to the available drugs or becoming more virulent.

India also fears outbreaks once-forgottten diseases like plague and leptospirosis in epidemic scale in future. India suffered disease outbreaks including pneumonic plague in Surat in 1994, leptospirosis in Kerala in 2002, SARS in Goa in 2003, anthrax in Mysore in 2004 and bird flu in West Bengal in 2008.

The 1994 outbreak of pneumonic plague caught the country unprepared. Reagents and antisera for diagnosis were not in stock and India had stopped making anti-plague vaccines five years earlier. A government committee found that the epidemic was due to failure of the surveillance system.

To avoid such failures in future too, India has already decided to pump in 5.1 billion rupees (US$110 million) over three years to convert its 100-year-old communicable diseases institute in New Delhi into the Indian equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

India has commmunicable diseases prevention establishment launched in 2004 with a $100-million World Bank aid. This disease surveillance system now covers all 600 districts with a disease surveillance officer and rapid response team in place in each district and 24-7 satellite communication links with Delhi.

Now India plans to upgrade the system into the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). It plans to use the fresh funding to modernize equipment and augment manpower. A network of public-health institutions will be created to improve diagnostic capabilities for emerging and re-emerging infections.

However, NCDC faces shortage of manpower at a time when new outbreaks of diseases such as leptospirosis are coming in as main problem. “It is hard to find epidemiologists. Most of those who nurtured our institute are about to retire. There were 20 officers in microbiology and zoonosis divisions in 1994 but now only 10 remain,”said Udaiveer Rana, joint director of the zoonoses division at the new centre, in a recent interview. A microbiologist and veterinary scientist, Mr Rana has been with the institute ever since he joined it 28 years ago.

Mr Rana sees forging large-scale collaborations with leading national laboratories and universities that have research programmes related to NCDC’s work, as one way to tackle the issue. Tie -ups with veterinary institutes scattered across the country will also help because 70% of new diseases appearing in India originate in animals, he stated.

Scientists from the CDC have been coming periodically to advise their Indian counterparts. Now, NCDC expects to have closer interactions with health systems in south and south-east Asian countries and the World Health Organization is promoting such collaborations. Over the coming year, faculty from the NCDC will conduct a workshop on zoonoses in Thailand, which is working on creating its own CDC, he added We hope in the years to come NCDC can take a bigger role in this region with the WHO’s help.