Ahmedabad civic body still in the dark about Zika

In May, Bapunagar was red flagged on the world map. The World Health Organisation designated India under risk category 2 after three Zika cases were reported from the slums here in east Ahmedabad.

Gujarat government’s decision to mask the Zika surveillance in Bapunagar as the Malaria-free Pilot Project, and keep the municipal corporation health officials out of the loop raised another storm. However, one month later, health officials are still in the dark.

According to information available with DNA, health workers from five districts — Mehsana, Kheda, Sabarkantha, Anand and Baroda — where brought in to screen residents for the Zika virus, while being told it was the Malaria-Free Pilot Project.

“The mosquito that spreads dengue, malaria, chikungunya and zika is Aedes Aegypti. So it was easy to keep health workers and officials of the municipal corporation uninformed of the zika surveillance and mask it as a malaria screening,” said a senior doctor from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC).

“We were instructed to pool in maximum workers from five districts and train them to collect fever history and blood serum samples in Bapunagar. The project was to be displayed at a Vibrant Gujarat summit (January 10 to 13) stall to show how maximum work in a concentrated population could help eliminate malaria,” the doctor said. “The government bore expenses of over Rs 7 lakh for transport, lodging and boarding of the health workers,” he added.

While 100 health workers of Ahmedabad city were deployed, 200 came in from the five districts in buses in three installments — from January 7 to 12, January 14 to 20, and February 1 to 7, and 25,000 houses were surveyed.

Chief medical officer of the AMC, Dr Bhavin Solanki confirmed this but refused to comment further.

The municipal corporation is a nodal agency for ensuring the city’s health and well being in case of a potential disease outbreak. According to the public health protocol, identified patients need to be tracked for

viraemia, and the potential spread of virus is usually carried out by the corporation’s health officials. However, the state has refused to share details of the three Zika patients — two women aged 22 and 34, and a man aged 64 — from Bapunagar with the AMC. Neither the municipal commissioner nor the Mayor of Ahmedabad were in the know.

According to Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Secretary, Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, “Ideally, in public health crisis scenarios, the municipal corporation is kept in loop. In this case, the state authorities took a call to not inform municipal authorities.”

“The blood sample reports were sent from state-run BJ Medical College to the State Health Department in Gandhinagar. We are still unaware of the location of these Zika patients. We only learned of Zika in Ahmedabad from the media, when the WHO reported it last month,” said Dr Solanki.

“While we were asked to conduct malaria control activities by the government, a team from the National Institute of Virology in Pune and Indian Council of Medical Research in Delhi engaged to track the three Zika patients for three months from January to March, but did not share activity details with us,” he said.