CDC stands ready to build off of long-established collaborations addressing a wide array of diseases to support the Government of India’s COVID-19 response to the pandemic.
CDC Emergency Assistance to India
- CDC has locally procured and delivered 500 oxygen cylinders to support the hospital system in high burden states identified by the Government of India.
- CDC experts will work in close collaboration with India’s public health experts in the following areas: laboratory, surveillance and epidemiology, emergency response and operations development, border health, bioinformatics for genomic sequencing and modeling, infection prevention and control, and risk communication.
CDC Support to India’s Ongoing COVID-19 Response
- CDC has allocated approximately $14 million towards COVID-19 Response support to India since March 2020, in collaboration with WHO, UNICEF, and other partners.
- CDC’s existing Global Health Security and HIV, TB, influenza and immunization programs serve in enhancing the expansion of India’s disease monitoring capabilities across a network of core public health areas, including:
- Emergency Management – CDC has trained several thousand postgraduate medical students, first line responders from the national disaster response force, rapid response team members, national and international participants on public health emergency management.
- Laboratory – CDC has provided technical guidance and training on safe sample collection, testing, transport and field biosafety to microbiologists, lab technicians, and healthcare workers from notified COVID-19 testing laboratories, state and district public health labs, along with first line responders from the National Disaster Response Force.
- Surveillance – CDC is leveraging existing HIV, AMR and HAI surveillance networks to support ongoing monitoring and analysis of COVID-19 surveillance indicators.
- Workforce Development – CDC supports the India Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) and other frontline disease detective training programs. These highly trained Indian EIS Officers are working on surveillance, cluster containment, contact tracing, IPC and capacity building.
- Infection Prevention and Control– CDC supported trainings for over 14,000 public health leaders, healthcare administrators, physicians, nurses, and hospital staff across 1,500 institutions, in five languages, in all Indian states on key topics in COVID-19 hospital preparedness and infection prevention and control.
CDC and India’s Longstanding Collaborations
- For over 20 years, U.S. CDC has successfully collaborated with the Government of India to address India’s public health priorities.
- CDC India collaborates with the Government of India, Indian institutions, and international organizations to address a wide range of infectious and non-communicable diseases and strengthen India’s health system to reach national and international goals.
- As a key implementer of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), CDC works with India to implement evidence-based, high impact, sustainable interventions in prevention, testing, linkage to treatment, retention, and viral load suppression to reach people at risk of and living with HIV.
- CDC provides technical support to addressing Tuberculosis (TB) in India, a leading cause of death.
- CDC has supported workforce development initiatives to build applied field epidemiology capacity through the Field Epidemiology Program (FETP) to strengthen the capacity of the public health workforce to detect, respond, and control disease outbreaks at the source.
