RESEARCH ARTICLE
Communicable Disease Surveillance during Gujarat, India Earthquake, 2001: A Survey
Rajnarayan R. Tiwari*, Kesari R. Bhatia, B.C. Lakkad
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 2
First Page: 7
Last Page: 10
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-2-7
DOI: 10.2174/1874944500902010007
Article History:
Received Date: 24/06/2008Revision Received Date: 15/10/2008
Acceptance Date: 14/11/2008
Electronic publication date: 30/1/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
During Gujarat earthquake in 2001, to keep a watch on the health problems and for effective control measures, disease surveillance activities were carried out. Every day different teams were sent to the field to collect the information about the morbidity and creating awareness about personal hygiene and use of safe chlorinated water, collection of blood smear for malaria parasite, identifying the mosquito breeding places etc. During the surveillance period a total of 261 health teams visited 510 villages of Kutchh region thereby covering a total of 141686 individuals. 691 cases of diarrhoea, 703 cases of fever, 89 cases of erythematous fever and 13 cases of jaundice were reported during the functioning of surveillance cell. Few cases of measles, chickenpox and hepatitis A were reported during the surveillance period. To conclude the disease surveillance activities helped in averting the occurrence of any epidemic of communicable disease.