The Department of Health and Family Welfare is launching public health campaigns from this week.
They include a programme for ensuring the health of the mother and child; efforts to prevent the outbreak of water-borne and vector-borne diseases; and a scheme to ensure cleanliness at hospitals, District Health and Family Welfare officer M.A. Jabbar told presspersons on Monday.
Safe motherhood
The safe motherhood programme would diagnose and treat problems among pregnant and lactating mothers. Government hospitals that were clean and well maintained would be awarded. The national de-worming scheme would protect children and adults against helminthes. The anti- filariasis drive would be re-launched.
“The Union and State governments are focussing on districts like Bidar that are considered endemic for diseases like filariasis and soil-transmitted helminthes and where prevalence of diseases like leprosy is high,” Dr. Jabbar said.
The department would run immunisation programmes for filariasis and helminthes infections concurrently.
“The district has 3,796 filariasis patients. The immunisation programme has covered children in schools and adults for the last 12 years. It was supposed to end in 2015, but had been extended for a few years now,” he said.
Accredited Social Health Activists and Health Department personnel would visit houses and distribute two types of tablets for a week from August 10.
Children will be given diethylcarbamazine citrate tablets at school to avoid filariasis infection. Adults would get them at home. Albendazole tablets to combat helminthes would be distributed at home for all.
Children aged below two, pregnant women and those with chronic illness had been exempted from consuming helminthes tablets.
ASHAs would send daily reports on the houses and individuals covered through an SMS-linked mobile application to a data centre in New Delhi. This feedback would help block-level officers focus on areas with low coverage, Dr. Jabbar said.
ASHAs had been asked to insist that the tablets were consumed in their presence. ASHAs would also try to create awareness about the need to maintain cleanliness around houses.
Inaguration
Bidar Zilla Panchayat president Bharat Bai Sherikar would launch the safe motherhood campaign at the civil hospital in the old city on Tuesday. Hospitals would organise treatment sessions for women on the ninth of every month.
B. Shivashankar, District Surveillance Officer, said that over 1,800 persons were suffering from gastroenteritis in the district this year, with 11 testing positive for cholera. “But even when one case tests positive, we consider the whole area cholera affected. There has been only one suspected cholera death,” he added.
