Hyderabad: CII-Southern Region organized its Annual Regional Meeting for the year 2022-23 and a conference on South India@100 with the theme “GOING BEYOND BOUNDARIES” in Hyderabad.
During the Session on ‘Creating a Healthier World in 2047 – Role of India’
Dr Roger Glass, Director, Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA said that there is a need to improve the human health through compassion and service. He mentioned that there is a need to be strengthen primary healthcare and scale up the healthcare reach which could create massive positive impact.
India has shown a way to the world on how quality vaccines could be produced in high quantity at a low cost. Cost makes a big differentiation in the developing world. Access to quality care is one thing that the world can learn from India, he said.
New Technologies are going to drive the healthcare sector. One of the challenges which the world is facing today not only access to care and access to medicines but how to ensure the patient takes the medicine on time. Science and Telemedicine can help us in improving the healthcare systems. Mobility and investing in innovation are going to be the biggest drivers of healthcare sector by 2047. One of the lessons pandemic has taught us is there is a need for global surveillance.
“The goal is we should be able to identify the next pandemic within 07 days and develop a vaccine in 100 days. In pandemics we learn as we go and use the same methods such as isolation, distancing and masking. The borders need to be closed immediately to lower the transmission,” he said.
Many African countries faced a serious challenges of no oxygen and no drugs and there is a need to develop abilities in access to care and linking the resources. As soon as pandemics are over we forget about them however, we need to improve the surveillance going forward. So that we can identify the pandemics soon and contain them earlier, he added.