India can boast of its own version of CDC — a full-fledged National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) — by next year, and the construction for it will begin within two months. The facility will be equipped with state-of-the-art infrastructure like wet and dry laboratories, highly-advanced bio-safety level-II and BSL-III laboratories. The authorities have set aside Rs 382.41 crore for NCDC.
A three-member high-level team from the Union health ministry — health secretary K Chandramouli, NCDC chief Dr L S Chauhan and joint secretary R S Shukla — was scheduled to visit Atlanta from April 9 to 15 "to study how the iconic institution functions, what are the technologies that will have to be replicated in India and how they carry out disease surveillance". The trip, however, got postponed on Friday.
Union health ministry sources told ToI, "One of the main departments in NCDC will handle microbial and antibiotic resistance. Our MoU with CDC (signed in 2010) entails that it will help us in strengthening our laboratory capacity and expand trained manpower to deal with new pathogens like NDM1 created superbug. CDC will help us in fighting drug resistance, surveillance for remerging infections and capacity building."
NCDC will have 15 exhaustive divisions, which will look at manpower, capacity building, outbreaks, laboratory technology, new pathogens, technology transfer, microbial resistance, drug-resistant TB, vector medicine, microbiology and biochemistry. The facilities at NCDC's eight out-station branches are also being upgraded.
Altogether, 245 additional posts — 210 technical and another 35 administrative openings — will be created for the new Centre by March, 2013.
The state-of-the-art laboratory is the seventh facility being set up by CDC, globally. The new Centre will share outbreak information, coordinate responses and support World Health Organization's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network to allow rapid identification, confirmation and response to outbreaks of international importance.
The MoU entailed sharing best practices for detection and response to emerging infections, advanced training in field epidemiology, surveillance for deadly diseases and building laboratory capacity for their diagnosis, using CDC's reference materials.
A major focus for the India laboratory will be zoonotic diseases. Approximately 75% of recently identified emerging infectious diseases affecting humans are diseases of animal origin. Additionally, 80% of pathogens — with a high potential for bioterrorism — are zoonotic.
The 2004 programme was funded by Congress in the wake of SARS outbreak. Experience with SARS demonstrated that a highly pathogenic infectious disease in a remote region can spread around the world in a matter of days or weeks.
