To prevent, control and manage water-borne diseases, particularly in urban areas of the state, the housing and urban development department and health and family welfare department have decided to collaborate with each other.
As part of the collaboration, the two departments have decided to form city level coordination committees between the health and water supply teams to ensure water quality management and incident management on real time basis in urban areas of the state.
The two has come up with actionable points which will be followed by the field-level officials of both departments to look after disease, laboratory, environmental and water quality surveillance of drinking water sources in order to prevent outbreak of water-borne diseases. “This endeavour will support in generation of early warnings that will help both teams to expedite mitigation measures in urban areas,” reads a letter jointly written by urban development secretary G Mathivathanan and health secretary Shalini Pandit addressed to the district collectors.
To strengthen the coordination, the departments will form 30 district-level groups and five municipal corporation-level groups, which will have members from Water Corporation of Odisha, Public Health Engineering Organisation, district-level public health officers and epidemiologists.
Officials said the groups will act as the watchdog on the outbreak. “Whenever there is occurrence of any water-borne disease (more than five cases), in any particular area, the information will be put in the group, which will be transmitted immediately to the senior officials of the two departments.
Similarly, whenever there is a leakage in water supply pipeline, which may cause a contamination of the drinking water, the information will be put in the group again and will be shared immediately with the senior officials of the health department for necessary action. The two departments have also decided to collect the sample and conduct the water quality testing jointly from now onwards.
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