Govt to upgrade institute of communicable diseases

To boost the country’s health infrastructure amid the outbreak of the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, the government today decided to revamp the premier National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) and renamed it as the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).

Upgrade of the NICD, which completed a century of existence today, has been taken up as a new initiative under the XIth Five-Year Plan with a Budgetary allocation of Rs 510 crore, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said, while announcing the new agenda for the NICD.

The ministry has already received an ‘in-principle’ approval of the Planning Commission in this regard and an agency has been hired to prepare the detailed project report, Azad said.

The minister said it was a change not only in the name but also in its agenda with more focus on epidemic intelligence services. The NCDC will modernise research for disease control and develop epidemic intelligence services for quick response to outbreak of diseases and develop models for forecasting them.

The institute will help in developing a network of public health institutions and improving diagnostic capabilities for emerging and re-emerging infections, he said.

Azad said the NCDC would provide enhanced quality services in their current activities while help in the development of a public health policy framework, conducting risk factor surveys for non-communicable diseases and developing human resource in public health.

He said that the NCDC would be addressing the country’s triple burden of diseases in the form of common communicable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and the emerging infectious diseases. ''Over two dozen new disease causing agents have emerged in the preceding three decades,’’ says Azad. The third threat was from Non-Communicable Diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart attack and cancer.