ISLAMABAD, Oct 15: The Federal government has asked the provinces to ensure early disease-warning system for detecting and controlling epidemics of different ailments.

An official source told Dawn that the federal government had asked the health departments of the four provinces to ensure implementation of the Disease Early Warning System (DEWS) by nominating provincial and district focal persons.

The provincial governments have also been asked to direct all the District Health Officers (DHOs) and the Executive District Officers (health) to implement DEWS at all Rural Health Centres and Basic Health Units.

The directives in this regard have already been issued to the health secretaries of Punjab, NWFP, Balochistan, Sindh, AJK and the Northern Areas.

The DEWS was jointly developed by the ministry of health and the World Health Organization.

The source said the implementation of DEWS was very important for countries like Pakistan to detect and control epidemics because the spread of communicable diseases has always been a major public health problem.

The DEWS, he the source added, helped a lot in reducing morbidity and mortality due to communicable diseases in the country.

Explaining DEWS, the source said the system was designed to detect epidemic-causing diseases at their earliest possible stages. Since all epidemic-causing diseases have an average of one-week incubation period, weekly assessment was crucial for the early detection of a disease for timely action, he said.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has already trained 2,000 health professionals on the management of DEWS besides monitoring of diseases through case definition documents, weekly reporting and recording of data.

The weekly watch charts have already been dispatched to all the districts of the country for data collection, plotting and subsequent analysis to detect epidemic at their earliest possible stages even at the most peripheral level of healthcare system.

The NIH has dealt with over 140 outbreaks of different diseases through DEWS since 1998.

The source said that if a medical officer, during his daily dealing with patients, encountered a case of probable viral haemorrhagic fever, cholera, polio or any other communicable disease, like Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), he would immediately call the concerned EDO (health) and at the same time would go to the field to investigate the case.