T Jacob John, virologist and former professor at Christian Medical College, Vellore has closely monitored mysterious disease outbreaks over the decades and says no agency in the country is equipped to investigate outbreaks. He spoke to Vibha Varshney. Edited excerpts:
T Jacob John: No. They are like post offices. You cannot hold them responsible for a bad message you get. They get messages and forward them to the correct authority. They send the messages to the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), which is under the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
The DGHS is designed to provide services and not investigate outbreaks. NCDC comes under DGHS and they are a small set-up fit for a tiny country, not one with a 1.38-billion population.
So, all reports end up at the NCDC. IDSP is doing its job — with extensive delays — but they are not what we need for investigating outbreaks.
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IDSP is a data channel and information is captured for knowledge and documentation for posterity, not for solving any problem or improving health or preventing disease, not even for outbreak control.
VV: Then what do we need?
TJJ: What we need is a public health system. Disease surveillance is a tool to notify diseases to public health experts. If there is no public health system, disease surveillance becomes an exercise for collecting data for updating knowledge.
True surveillance is information for action then and there, not delayed. IDSP cannot do this as the design of the health management system in India is deeply flawed.
Human health management — which is both prevention and treatment of diseases — is of a dismally low standard in India.
Source: Downto Earth
