2-day conference on issues related to infectious diseases

A two-day conference on infectious diseases, was organised by Manipal McGill Center for Infectious Diseases, with Department of Medicine, Kasturba Medical College, McGill Global Health Programs and TMA Pai Endowment Chair in Translational Epidemiology.

The conference deliberated and discussed issues related to infectious diseases.

Manipal University VC Dr H Vinod Bhat hoped that in coming years, Manipal McGill Centre for Infectious Diseases will take on advocacy and policy issues to have the needed impact on reducing infectious diseases mortality in India.

Prof Chandrasekar, chief of Infectious Diseases at Wayne State University, Detroit, spoke on recent advances in the diagnostics of fungal infections for earlier diagnosis to reduce mortality.

Dr Madhukar Pai from McGill University, Montreal, spoke about the need for an essential diagnostics list. Such a list could be helpful in improving patient care, helping detect outbreaks, increasing the affordability of tests, reducing out-of-pocket expenses for tests and antibiotic abuse, improving regulation and quality of diagnostic tests, strengthening accreditation and quality of laboratories, improving supply chain and guiding the R and D of new diagnostic tools.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has begun the process of developing an essential diagnostics list, similar to WHO’s work on the essential medicines list. Once the WHO EDL is published, it will give countries like India a much-needed impetus to develop national lists of essential diagnostics.

A panel of infectious disease experts deliberated on the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the role of diagnostic stewardship and strategies of antimicrobial stewardship to overcome this crisis.

Dr Padmini Srikantiah from Center for Disease Control, US Global Diseases Detection program, who investigated the Muzzafarpur Litchi-induced hypoglycemic encephalopathy outbreak in Muzaffarpur, India, spoke on outbreak investigation emphasising the need for a systematic approach in investigating all outbreaks to prevent such events from recurring.