New Delhi: In an attempt to estimate the prevalence of Covid-19 infection among area wise population, India has started community based survey.
Sources in the Health Ministry told ETV Bharat on Tuesday that the decision was taken following increasing number of COVID-19 cases from different states.
Interestingly, Health Ministry has been denying community outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Initiated by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in collaboration with department of Health and Family Welfare and National Centre for Disease Control, the community based sero-survey will estimate the prevalence of SARS-Co-2 infection in Indian population.
The survey is also being supported by different State Health department and key stake holders including WHO.
The survey is coordinated by ICMR's National Institute of Epidemiology (NIE) and National Institute of Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), Chennai. This household level cross-sectional survey will cover 24000 adults distributed equally across four strata of districts categorised on the basis of reported cases of Covid-19.
The survey will be conducted in randomly selected 69 districts from 21 States. This will involve collection of venous blood samples from 400 randomly selected individuals (one per household) from 10 clusters in each district.
Sera from this individuals will be tested for presence of IgG antibodies using ELISA test developed by ICMR-National Institute of Virology, Pune.
The results of the survey will provide information about spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in different parts of the country.
Besides, this community-based survey, Ministry of Health is also initiating hospital based surveillance to monitor the trend of infection in all districts.
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Three districts from Andhra Pradesh, three districts from Assam, six districts from Bihar, three districts each from Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, six districts from Maharashtra, two districts from Punjab, one from Haryana, nine districts from Uttar Pradesh, one each from Uttarakhand, J&K and Himachal Pradesh and six districts from West Bengal have been selected for the community survey.
As methodology of the survey, 10 health facilities from each district will be selected and people will be divided into two groups including low risk population (non-ILI patients, pregnant women) and high risk population (health care workers).
Meanwhile, the Food Safety and Standard Authority of India (FSSAI) has initiated training for food handlers under its flagship Food Safety Training & Certification (FoSTaC) programme.
Officials said that FSSAI is engaged with State food safety departments, communicating the emerging priorities in food safety landscape.
"The priorities communicated include expediting work related to licensing on the online portal, establish licensing helpline in each state with a dedicated number and email id, create robust complaint handling mechanism, contact only essential inspection among others," officials from FSSAI said.
