The Union health ministry has given its administrative approval and the expenditure sanction for the Department of Health Research (DHR)’s proposal for establishing a network of 160 laboratories across the country for managing epidemics and natural calamities.

Sources in the DHR said that as the DHR received the administrative approval from the ministry, it will begin the project very soon. Even though the DHR had some time back received the finance ministry’s nod for the project, it was waiting for the administrative approval to actually begin the project. Under the project, the DHR will establish 10 regional labs, 30 state level labs and 120 medical college level labs in a phased manner during the 12th Five Year Plan at an estimated cost of Rs.646.83 crore.

In the first phase of the project, the DHR will establish two regional labs, five state level labs and 10 medical college level labs in the year 2013-14; three regional labs, 10 state level labs and 40 medical college level labs in the year 2014-15; five regional labs, 15 state level labs and 40 medical college level labs during 2015-16; and the remaining 30 medical college level labs will be established in 2016-17.

The establishment of three-tier network of laboratories across the country will greatly help in building capacity for handling viral diseases in the country in terms of early and timely diagnosis, development of tools to predict viral disease outbreaks beforehand, continuous monitoring and surveillance of existing as well as new viral strains and handling viruses with a potential to be used as agents of bio-terrorism. This would also help in smooth data flow from across the sites of epidemics, creation of efficient knowledge management network for policy interventions like quick deployment of resources and measures like introduction of preventive strategies, new vaccines, etc.

The regional labs will be equipped with state of the art BSL-3 facilities and the state level labs will have BSL-2 facilities. The lowest tier labs at the medical colleges will be equipped with the appropriate infrastructure to carry out serology for viruses (ELISA based diagnosis). In case of any outbreak or epidemic, these medical college level labs will carry out the initial diagnosis and screening at the most peripheral areas and nearest to the site of outbreak. Each medical college lab will cover a cluster of three to four districts.

While the medical college labs will be expected to identify all listed common viruses, the viruses/agents which cannot be identified by these labs will be referred to the state/regional labs for identification and/or characterization.

All the laboratories will work under the overall guidance of apex institutions like NIV, NCDC through appropriate linkages and networking. The States/UTs which do not presently have any government medical college will be linked with the nearby state’s laboratories. At present, only the national apex institutes like NCDC, New Delhi and NIV, Pune are mandated to undertake the investigations that results in heavy burden affecting their real referral role. The resultant delay in diagnosis and detection and inadequate or incomplete data during the outbreaks significantly impact the response time for interventions.