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High-Level Meeting on Strategies
and Progress for Eliminating Kala-Azar
Assuring
full commitment to eliminating kala-azar, the
Health Secretaries and Directors of Health Services of India, Bangladesh and
Nepal discussed strategies to meet the goal by 2015 at a high-level meeting
in New Delhi on February 20.
The
WHO Representative to India,
Dr S.J. Habayeb, and WHO Representatives to Nepal
and Bangladesh
participated in the high-level meeting organized by WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia.
Ahead
of the meeting, programme managers from the three
countries which signed a Memorandum of Understanding in May 2005 for
eliminating the disease by 2015, met in Faridabad from February 17 to 19
to discuss the progress so far. Representatives from Bhutan, which
has reported a few cases of kala-azar, and
officials from Tropical Disease Research Section of WHO headquarters, WHO
Country Offices and the World Bank attended the meeting.
The
program managers discussed the strategies to reach the goal of reducing kala-azar incidence to less than one per 10,000 population at the district and sub-district levels.
To
scale up operations, the programme managers
recommended prioritizing capacity building of human resources at different
levels of program implementation, fostering partnerships with non-government
and private sector under the government leadership and establishing
cross-border collaboration for synchronizing implementation strategies. These
recommendations were endorsed at the high-level meeting.
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