One Health SOPs drawn up for the management of various infectious diseases

One Health project is currently being implemented as part of the World Bank-aided Rebuild Kerala project in four districts of the State - Alappuzha, Pathanamthitta, Kottayam, and Idukki

As part of the One Health initiative to establish an early disease surveillance, prevention, and control mechanism in districts, the Health department will soon come out with detailed standard operating procedures (SOP) for the outbreak investigation and control of at least eight diseases.

This is perhaps for the first time that infectious diseases outbreak investigation guidelines are being prepared at the State-level on the One Health platform.

The SOPs for several diseases/ disease conditions- water-borne diseases like acute diarrhoeal diseases; Hepatitis A and E ; food-borne infections; mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, chikungunya and zika; Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (Japanese encephalitis and West Nile fever); Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD); Nipah; leptospirosis; and Avian influenza- have been drawn up on the One Health platform at a two-day joint outbreak investigation planning workshop organised by the Centre for One Health, Kerala, here. The workshop concluded on Wednesday.

The detailed guidelines for the prevention and control of these infectious diseases on the One Health platform have been drawn up with the cooperation of various departments.

The One Health project is currently being implemented as part of the World Bank-aided Rebuild Kerala project in four districts - Alappuzha, Pathanamthitta, Kottayam, and Idukki.

The aim is to establish a community-based disease surveillance network so that volunteers trained in One Health will be able to report on any unusual events or death of animals/birds in a locality so that early warning and early preventive or control measures become possible.

As part of the project, training has already been imparted to 2.5 lakh volunteers (56 in every ward) in these four districts

One Health has been included as a major component of the second phase of Aardram Mission, as it is now recognised that the health of human beings is inextricably linked to the health of animals and the environment and that coordinated efforts of Health and allied departments such as Animal Husbandry, Forest, Food Safety, Agriculture and Fisheries departments, are necessary to keep a check on the increasing incidence of zoonotic disease outbreaks.

The heads of various departments, officials, local body representatives, district mentors and community mentors, who have already been imparted training on One Health concept, participated in the workshop.

“During sudden disease outbreaks, often the different departments involved will have different ways of responding to the situation, often resulting in duplication of activities or contradictory steps, which could blunt the response to the event, apart from being a waste of resources. Once standard protocols are in place, there will be parallel sharing of local information and action between departments so that the system’s response to the situation can be quicker and more effective,” said V. Jitesh, executive director of State Health System Resource Centre, which is managing the One Health initiative.