- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
Hoping to improve treatment rates for kala-azar, one of the world's deadliest parasitic diseases, which infects as many as 300 000 people and claims as many as 20 000 lives in India annually, the government has introduced a new coding system capable of tracking infected patients down to the village level to ensure compliance.
Known medically as visceral leishmaniasis and colloquially as black fever, kala-azar is caused by a parasite transmitted by the pheobozomine sand fly and is now endemic in 48 districts of 4 states in India, putting an estimated population of 165.4 million at risk, according to the Indian government's Directorate of National Vector Borne Disease Control Program. The disease primarily affects the rural poor, particularly the large economic class of landless agricultural labourers.
The directorate will introduce a new coding system that will enable tracking of kala-azar patients down to the primary health subcentre or village level. It's hoped the system will improve treatment compliance, while simultaneously providing more accurate tallies of the number of infected.
“It's an impressive scheme,” Swapan Jana, secretary of an India-based non-governmental organization, Society for Social Pharmacology told CMAJ. “This scheme is a significant initiative to control kala-azar in India, because through the implementation of coding, the treatment would be more focused and a thorough patient monitoring would be plausible.”
Under the scheme, “each Kala-azar case will have the country code IND along with the state code and have a 10 digit numerical code.” The scheme will be implemented in 4 states: Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Country code-cum-state codes have been allocated to each: Uttar Pradesh-IND1, Bihar-IND2, Jharkhand-IND3 and West Bengal-IND4.