Train health administrators first, says Chennai public health expert Kuganantham.
“There is an urgent need for training Indian public health administrators as conscientious and dynamic public health leaders. The WHO’s doomsday scenario in the realm of infectious diseases is a genuine apprehension. It is time all concerned put their shoulders to the wheel and avert such catastrophes,” says Dr.P.Kuganantham, a noted public health expert based in Chennai, the capital of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
It was in the backdrop of the current cholera outbreak in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, Medindia spoke to Kuganantham who is the Chennai Corporation’s Health Officer.
This public health administrator had played a notable role in containing the cholera epidemic twice in the recent past, first time in 1987 when nearly 15,000 cases were reported to be affected by the Cholera epidemic and again five years later.
During the second attack of the epidemic over 20,000 persons were hospitalized, but hardly two per cent of them succumbed to the disease. The efforts that Dr. Kuganantham had taken then earned him widespread appreciation. The World Health Organization too had lauded his initiatives . It was then the new strain of Vibrio cholerae was identified in the communicable diseases hospital at Chennai and came to be known as the Madras strain. (Chennai was then known as Madras.)
Cholera, as we know, is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium
Vibrio cholerae. The mode of transmission of the disease is by consuming contaminated water. When subsequent epidemics of the new strain broke out in many places across the world, the Chennai experience came in handy.
