Health minister says gaps in provinces’ response to diseases being addressed. PHOTO: EXPRESS
This was stated by Health Minister Saira Afzal Tarar while presiding over the eleventh Annual Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Response course.
“In recent years, we have faced enormous challenges associated with massive outbreaks of chikungunya in 2016 and 2017, measles epidemic in 2017, rain havoc in many parts of the country,” Tarrar said, adding that public health professionals were playing a commendable role in disease surveillance and in responding to outbreaks across the country.
“We are now engaged in a major fight against polio and the whole world is expecting a lot from us. All of these challenges have necessitated the need to greatly enhance the national capacity for disease surveillance, outbreak detection and response,” she said, adding the training was a major step in the government’s mission to build the capacity of public health professionals of all provinces in effective disease surveillance and response to outbreaks.
The minister said that a major step was taken by the Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Programme (FELTP) to establish disease surveillance and outbreak response units at the federal, provincial and regional levels.
Since all four provinces have notified these units, it shows how provinces realise the need for these units which would not only provide practical training to public sector doctors in disease outbreak response but could also act as emergency operation centres.
Through FELTP fellows, the provinces would, for the first time, have a group of public health doctors who are properly trained to quickly detect and respond to diseases quickly.
“Now it is the responsibility of all of us at the federal and provincial health departments to support this initiative and provide enabling the environment to these new units to make them an effective tool in our fight against diseases,” the health minister said.
“These units have responded to 120 outbreaks in first seven months of 2017 and thousands of children have been protected in the subsequent vaccination campaigns,” she detailed while providing an overview of the programme.
Terming surveillance the best way to detect and control outbreaks, she said that it also allows preventive measures to be put in place before full-scale epidemics occur.
Recent large scale epidemics across Pakistan have highlighted some critical gaps in the post devolution surveillance and response arrangements which are being seriously looked in to, the minister added.
“Additionally, as a responsible member of the international community, we are also striving to quickly beef up our IHR implementation arrangements so as to detect, respond, identify and report the public health events of national and international concern.”
To revitalise counter-disease measures, Tarrar said that a new division of Field Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance has been set up at National Institute of Health.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 27th, 2017.
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