'Kolkata's infrastructure to fight dengue is the very best in the country'

Kolkata: Deputy Mayor Atin Ghosh proposed to Mayor Firhad Hakim on Friday to form a special team comprising elected representatives from all political parties, who would visit the metro cities in the country and see on their own how Kolkata Municipal Corporation has developed the infrastructure to fight dengue in the city.

"Kolkata's infrastructure to fight dengue is the very best in the country. I would urge our Mayor to form a team with elected representatives from all political parties who would visit the four metros- namely Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru and check out on their own how they lack the infrastructure in comparison to that developed by us," Ghosh said, in response to two similar proposals on dengue placed by Congress councillor Prakash Upadhyay and CPI(M) councillor Chayan Bhattacharjee, at the monthly meeting of KMC on Friday. Ghosh is in charge of the Health department of the KMC.

A three-tier surveillance team, morning data collector, 16 detection centres and Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) machines for diagnostic services have been developed by KMC in connection with infrastructure to fight against the disease.

The RT-PCR that was installed recently is a cutting-edge device that can directly detect viral DNAs.

Ghosh, who had recently visited Germany, said that civic representatives from the foreign countries also wanted to know KMC's about work on dengue awareness and prevention. "There was a time when dengue was a phenomenon in developing countries but now it has made inroads in developed countries too. In most countries the temperature is above 18 degree Celsius, with relative humidity above 60 percent during most of the year. This is an ideal climatic condition for breeding of dengue mosquitoes," Ghosh said.

KMC is the only municipal corporation in the country where there is a research laboratory where Health department officials are trained on demarcating a dengue causing mosquito from others.

"I have written to the state Health department, expressing our interest to impart such training to people from all civic bodies in the state in this area," he maintained.

Ghosh said that there have been six fatal dengue cases this year in Kolkata.