India to eradicate Kala-azar by 2015: Harshvardhan

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 Harshvardhan said here today.
"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," Harshvardhan 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.

Harshvardhan, 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," Harshvardhan said.