Scientists and public health experts, while appreciating the responsiveness of Kerala’s public health system, have yet again urged the State to invest in basic and clinical research, data development and intelligent analytics, so that clear patterns on disease burden and its distribution and mortality analysis can be made.
For the second consecutive day, at the seminar on Kerala’s successes in managing public health emergencies organised as part of Keraleeyam, health experts called for the State to look at the inequities in access to healthcare within the State and how the vulnerable communities continued to have poor access to healthcare and poorer outcomes.
Soumya Swaminathan, former chief scientist of World Health Organisation and chairperson of M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, said that Kerala needed to invest much more in basic science as well as clinical research and have resource persons trained in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research for fine tuning a pre-emptive response to future pandemics.
This was important as more and more viral, vector-borne diseases and zoonotic diseases were going to be the order of the day, given the increasing issues of climate change and threats to biodiversity.
Despite having an efficient health system, one area of public health that the State was still weak was the proper reporting of medically certified cause of death. For a majority of deaths, Kerala was not able to report the medically certified cause of death. Without this data, one cannot have a good understanding of disease burden or its changing patterns or proper mortality analysis, Dr. Swaminathan said.
Setting up a network across medical colleges, public and private academic institutions for undertaking clinical trials, operation and implementation research will help Kerala to understand the determinants and risk factors for diseases within the State. She urged Kerala to look closely at health inequities within the State and to devise special strategies to improve the health of vulnerable communities.
Virologist T. Jacob John appreciated the State applying epidemiologic intelligence to mount a pre-emptive response to COVID-19, when the disease first emerged in the State. He urged doctors to dig deep into the causative factors of disease in every patient they see, rather than sweep things under the carpet. Public health was not about government hospitals and what governments had to do but it was all about pre-empting diseases, health protection and health security, he pointed out.
Richard A. Cash, global health expert, spoke about the community engagement in the health sector in Kerala and the trust that people had in the government as key factors which helped Kerala manage the pandemic well.
Former Additional Chief Secretary (Health) Rajeev Sadanandan spoke about how the State needed to prepare a roadmap to pandemic preparedness through universal surveillance of zoonotic diseases and coordinated management by various departments, strengthening laboratories and lab-based surveillance, conducting regular mortality conferences and pathological autopsies in teaching hospitals and developing a good data intelligence analysis platform. He spoke about designating and training health personnel to respond to public health emergencies, setting up a contingency plan and getting policy makers to sign off on an emergency procurement system for drugs and consumables during public health emergencies.
Former Health Minister K.K. Shylaja, chairman of the Covid expert committee of the State, B. Ekbal, Principal Secretary (Health) A.P.M. Mohammed Hanish, former Director of National Institute of Virology, Priya Abraham also spoke.
Health Minister Veena George chaired the event.
