Government aims to eradicate Kala-azar by 2015, says Harsh Vardhan

Patna: The government aims to eradicate the dreaded disease ‘Kala-azar’ or Visceral Leishmaniasis, also known as ‘Black Fever’ and ‘Dumdum Fever’ from India by 2015. The central government has formulated an intensive strategy for this purpose with the aim that nobody goes untreated or gets infected of this second largest parasitic killer in the world after Malaria, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said here today. [caption id=“attachment_1694065” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Harsh Vardhan. AFP[/caption] “We have released the National Roadmap for Kala-azar Elimination in India. House-to-house search will be conducted and its patients will be brought for treatment. It can be cured with a single, 10mg dose of Liposomal Amphotericin B,” he said. “The target is to make our country free of this disease by 2015,” Harsh Vardhan said. “Kala-azar has been made a notifiable disease and the doctors will have to report it. A new test has been invented, which uses saliva and urine of the patients to detect it”, he said. Medical practioners, Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) and health workers were being trained. ASHA workers would be given monetary incentives to identify and send patients to hospitals, he said while speaking at a workshop on Kala-azar organised here. It was attended by Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, state Health Minister Ramdhani Singh, Union Health Secretary Lov Verma, WHO India head Nata Menabde, as well as, several researchers, doctors and officials. Harsh Vardhan, who himself is a trained doctor, said 54 districts in the country, including 33 of Bihar, 11 of West Bengal and four of Jharkhand, are affected by the disease caused by protozoan parasites of Leishmania genus. According to Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, an estimated five lakh Kala-azar infections happen every year across the globe. “We will not allow poor people and children to get infected by this killer disease after 2015. Its time to banish it from the country,” Harsh Vardhan said. The Union Minister said the road map to eliminate the disease has been made after consulting Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and the World Health Organisation (WHO). He also said the central government was coordinating with the National Centre of Diseases Control at Atlanta in the US to check Encephalitis in the country. Complementing Harsh Vardhan, Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi said he was accepting the Kala-azar elimination programme as a challenge, and an intensive campaign would be launched across the state to free it of the disease. “We will participate in the elimination programme with utmost sincerity and end the disease just like we have finished polio and small pox in the state. A majority of our districts are affected by Kala-azar and 70 percent of patients in the country are located here,” said Manjhi. The Bihar Chief Minister added that the central government will help the state with medicines, infrastructure and specialists in the eradication work. “We will reach every village and each house in the state to detect patients and provide treatment. We will take measures to control the spread of the disease, and will also use DDT and emphasis on hygiene to check it,” Manjhi said. Later in the day, Harshvardhan and Manjhi dedicated two non-invasive, cost-effective and speedy tests developed by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) at Rajendra Medical Research Institute (RMRI) for diagnosing Kala-azar. These tests are easy to conduct, could be done at primary health centres also and can provide results in 10-15 minutes. PTI