Health Ministry supplies Covid-19 vaccine by drones in North East

The Union Health Ministry on Monday used drones for the first time to ferry Covid-19 vaccines to a corner of North East India, opening up a new route to close the last mile gap in supplying medical aids to remote areas.

An indigenous unmanned aerial vehicle transported the vaccines from Bishnupur district hospital to Karang island, Loktak lake in Manipur, covering an aerial distance of 15 km in about 12-15 minutes. The actual road distance between these locations is 26 km.

The vaccines were taken to a primary health centre on the island where 10 beneficiaries received the first dose and eight got the second shot. Nearly 50 per cent of the PHCs at Manipur are located at remote places that are difficult to access.

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Such drone flights by the Indian Council of Medical Research for vaccine supply have also been permitted for Nagaland and Andaman and Nicobar Islands by the Director General of Civil Aviation. The ICMR’s vaccine drone, however, is not the first example of such flight in India.

Last month Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia launched a pilot project named 'Medicines from the Sky' at Vikarabad in Telangana, under which drugs and vaccines were delivered to 16 PHC using drones.

"Over the last three weeks, more than 70 UAV flights took off carrying Covid-19 vaccines and medicines to the primary health care centres in Telangana. Every day there are four to five flights,” Suresh Munuswamy, a senior researcher at the Public Health Foundation of India, who is associated with the Telangana project told DH.

Before seeking the DCGI nod, the ICMR conducted an initial study in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur to test the capacity of drones to carry and transfer vaccines safely.

The study provided promising results on the basis of which the Ministry of Civil Aviation and DGCA granted permission to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight up to a height of 3,000 metre.

“We can use drones in delivering important life-saving medicines and collecting blood samples. This technology may prove a game-changer in addressing the challenges in health care delivery, particularly health supplies in difficult areas,” said Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandiviya.

The PHFI team has already proposed an annual drone-based medical supply service to the North Eastern states, Telangana and Gujarat.

The plan is not only to send the medicines and vaccines, but also to bring back patients’ blood and other pathological samples from remote areas to the nearest diagnostic centre at the block or district level.

Such services are routinely provided by commercial companies in some of the advanced nations.