The lesson for India from the central African Ebola crisis is that it needs to put in place “a strong public health system, frontline health workers, effective risk communication to the public, and a private sector that is responsible to the public health system,” said K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), and an internationally recognised authority in public health.
Dr. Reddy was here to receive an honorary doctorate for his contributions to public health and cardiology from Princess Anne, the Chancellor of the University of London, at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace.
Screening at airports and seaports should be continued, but that is not enough. “The problem with Ebola is that you may be totally asymptomatic through a long incubation period when you are infective and may not know what you have.”
The risk of someone slipping in undetected and infecting others is otherwise high. If there is a high index of suspicion that a person travelling from one of the Ebola-infected African countries, or even from Dubai on the same flight, “the public health system must be able to alert the person without frightening or stigmatising him or her to report symptoms if they arise. Contact-tracing and clear-cut protocols on how to deal with reported cases must then follow,” Dr. Reddy said.
The lessons from the experiences of Nigeria and the U.S. must be extrapolated into the Indian situation, Dr. Reddy argued.
“Nigeria, with its limited facilities, followed sound public health systems by mass mobilisation of its health workers and citizenry to do case-identification and contact-tracing,” he said.
At a more fundamental level, the reason for the proliferation of zoonotic (animal to human) diseases in the last 15-20 years like SARS, H1N1, Bird Flu, and now Ebola is because of new systems of agriculture and livestock farming that are creating a conveyor belt for hitherto confined viruses and vectors into new veterinary populations and human habitat.
The PHFI has a collaboration with a consortium of 17 leading U.K. public health institutes and universities for training health professionals from its seven centres in India, said Dr. Reddy.
