Vizag among 6 locations in India to study Dengue and Chikungunya sero-prevalence
Vishakhapatanam: Vizag will be one of the six locations in the country to have the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC)’s demographic and health surveillance (DHS) units.
Other locations are the INCLEN Trust International at Shillong in Meghalaya, the Regional Medical Research Centre at Bhubaneswar, the Society of Applied Sciences and Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, and the Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences.
The main objective of these units is to study the sero-prevalence of dengue and chikungunya among other diseases among the selected masses mapped by the unit team.
The Andhra Medical College (AMC), Vizag, has been entrusted with the task of heading the unit in Vizag.
Confirming this to Deccan Chronicle, AMC principal Dr PV Sudhakar said, "We have mapped nearly 11,000 people among a one lakh population in a particular area Simhachalam, and 1,300 volunteers for Covid19 vaccine clinical trials under this project. Vizag has been shortlisted out of many cities in the country."
They have started surveying the health of the mapped people, but have not yet utilised the services of the volunteers for the Covid19 clinical trials, Dr Sudhakar said.
A special team was also recruited for this project, which works for five years under a single package.
The total budget for this project was Rs.5.7 crore for initiating a new DHS site and longitudinal incidence study of dengue and chikungunya and establishing GCP compliant field site for conduct of vaccine trials in future.
The data generated here is synchronized with a central server maintained by New Delhi-based INCLEN Trust International.
The current project was initiated at a rural health centre at Simhachalam that covers 12 sub-centres. Some of the sub-centres for this project in the city include Adivivaram, Pedagadili, Lakshmi Nagar and Indira Nagar.
The principal investigator of the project was Dr Devi Madhavi from the Community Medicine, AMC. The project was funded under the national Bio-Pharma Mission and it was sanctioned in 2020 to the AMC. The services of National Remote Sensing Centre at Hyderabad and the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Delhi were utilized for this project.
