A select committee of the State Legislature on the Kerala Public Health Bill, 2021, is holding its sitting at the Kozhikode collectorate here on Monday even as the Ayurveda medical fraternity has complained that the proposed law is ignoring traditional systems of Indian medicine to favour modern medicine.
Health and Family Welfare Minister Veena George will chair the meeting, the purpose of which is to collect the opinion of officials, health experts, public health activists, people’s representatives, organisations and other sections of society. The Bill has been conceived after merging provisions in the Madras Public Health Act, 1939, and the Travancore-Cochin Public Health Act, 1955. The effort is to bring in a comprehensive Act for checking the spread of communicable diseases and for the department to make effective and coordinated interventions, including legal steps.
Those in the Ayurveda industry, however, pointed out that AYUSH doctors were not involved in the preparation of the draft Bill. This law can also be used for stifling the Ayurvedic system and impede useful research in this field in connection with the cure of communicable diseases. They claimed that there was nothing common in the list of communicable diseases as given in its chapter 7. Ayurvedic doctors also are amused at the provision of punishment for the failure to report a communicable disease.
There are no sufficient safeguards in the law to prevent possible infringement of the outreach of Ayurvedic system. The effort is to indirectly suppress one system of healthcare to favour another, they added.
