Metropolitan Surveillance Unit (MSU) to be set up in Bengaluru to identify health threats, disease outbreaks

Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has planned to set up Metropolitan Surveillance Unit (MSU) in Bengaluru.

This unit will be set up on the premises of the Public Health Institute (PHI) in the city for early identification of health threats and any disease outbreaks.

MSU will act as a hub for the surveillance of the outbreak of diseases and enable real-time reporting of medical data on potential disease outbreaks. This move is part of BBMP’s public health strategy to prevent and fight outbreak of diseases in the city.

This unit will be fully funded by the centre to help BBMP in putting up a structural surveillance system to identify potential disease outbreaks. This unit serves as a crucial epidemiological tool in public health sector.

“The MSU will generate and verify alerts on health-related events from different sources, support collection and analysis samples for water, food, vector borne and zoonotic diseases. It will facilitate collaborative surveillance by ensuring onboarding of all reporting units - private and the government,” quoted The Hindu as told by BBMP’s Special Commissioner for Health, K.V. Thrilok Chandra.

The commissioner told this while speaking at a workshop on “Building back better surveillance systems” organised jointly by Global Learning Collaborative for Health Systems Resilience, Tata Institute for Genetics and Society (TIGS) and Access Health International in Bengaluru.

As part of its public health strategy, the BBMP had recently set up a ‘One Health Cell’ with the aim to prevent any outbreak of zoonotic diseases and protect public from any major health related problems arising from any sort of disease outbreak.