‘Metropolitan surveillance unit’ to give Hyderabad’s ability to control disease spread a shot in the arm

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Hyderabad could soon have a Metropolitan Surveillance Unit (MSU) by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to identify and track the spread of diseases.

Spadework is also being carried out to establish a unit of the NCDC in the city, most probably in Nacharam. A team of NCDC representatives visited the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) office on Thursday (September 12) to finalise details of location and other facilities to establish the unit.

According to sources, the NTPC building in Secunderabad, Institute of Preventive Medicine (IPM) in Narayanguda and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) are being considered for housing the unit. While an establishment for disease reporting could be hosted in the NTPC building, NIMS and the IPM could provide labs needed for running the tests, said an official, who sought anonymity.

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centre has embarked on a project under the PM Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM) to set up MSUs in 20 cities along the lines of Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme. This is to address the vulnerability of urban areas to disease spread.

Of the 20, Hyderabad is one of the tier I cities, which also include Ahmedabad, Chennai, Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi, Thane, Kolkata, Mumbai and Lucknow. Tier II cities where MSUs will be set up are Agra, Jaipur, Bhopal, Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Shimla, Chandigarh, Gurugram, Guwahati and Patna.

MSUs will act as a disease surveillance hub in the city and facilitate real-time reporting of surveillance data on outbreak prone diseases from public and private sectors. Their functions include generating and verifying alerts on health-related events and supporting collection and analysis of samples for water-, food- and vector-borne and zoonotic diseases.

They will also facilitate planning and coordination of response by stakeholders such as civic bodies and health, food safety and animal husbandry departments and build the cities’ capacity to respond to disease outbreaks.