Bangladesh is going to be formally declared the 10th Global Disease Detection site for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, very soon.
Health Minister Ruhal Haque will inaugurate the site in the Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) of the Directorate General of Health Service at Mohakhali in the capital, on August 20.
The minister will also inaugurate the Residency Course on Field Epidemiology Training Programme on the same day.
The course duration is two years and 80% of it will be field oriented with the rest being classroom learning.
A four-member delegation of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is coming to Bangladesh to formally declare the Global Disease Detection (GDD) site.
There are only ten GDD countries including Bangladesh across the world.
The other nine countries include China, Egypt, Georgia, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Kenya, India, South Africa and Thailand.
Prof Dr Mahmudur Rahman, director of IEDCR, told the Dhaka Tribune that Bangladesh would be greatly benefited from the research of different emerging and reemerging diseases in the laboratory.
He added that the field epitomology training course is going to open a new door for Bangladesh to increase the number of public health experts.
Around 70 applications have been dropped against five seats for enrolment in the course.
The trained medical officers will impart an extensive training in the field levels and earn an additional remuneration of Tk20,000 every month.
Dr Mahmudur said they planned to extend the training course in the future to make at least 64 public health experts for 64 districts in the country.
He told the Dhaka Tribune, Bangladesh have a big shortage of well-trained public health experts.
GDD was designated by WHO as a key partner to help implement the IHR (2005) for its 194 member states, and named as the first WHO Collaborating Center for Implementation of International Health Regulations National Surveillance and Response Capacity.
The disease detection site works directly with the health ministries, WHO and established CDC programmes to help develop critical core capacities in order to reduce the timeline for the identification and control of emerging infectious diseases.
