Bengaluru:
Manipal Centre for Virus Research (MCVR), a research department at Manipal University (MU) has been awarded the Research Cooperative Agreement Grant (RCAG) worth $1.143 million.
The award has been sanctioned by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), United States Department of Health and Human Services, through the coordinating office, Global Health (GH). The grant was awarded for the application submitted by Dr. G Arun Kumar, professor and head, MCVR and Dr TMA Pai Endowed Chair in Translational Virology, for his project titled Hospital Based Surveillance of Acute Febrile Illness in the Western Ghat Region of India, which is on detecting etiologies of emerging infectious disease in the Western Ghats region of Karnataka and Kerala.
The other departments of Manipal University involved in this grant are the departments of Statistics, Public Health, Microbiology (Kasturba Medical College, Manipal & Mangalore), Community Medicine (Kasturba Medical College, Manipal) and the School of Communication.
According to Dr. Arun Kumar, the study will provide authentic information on the causes of the fevers (acute febrile illness), the distribution of such causes and diseases in the community over time, as well as its geographical spread. This will help to design future clinical case management strategies and public health interventions to reduce death and disability, by reducing the economic effects and ensuring good health among the people of the region.
Secondly, this grant includes a lot of technical support by the sponsoring agency and will result in significant technical capacity building at MCVR.
“The grant has been provided by the world’s best public health laboratory and the mechanism of cooperative agreement grant involves significant technical assistance. This grant gives us an opportunity to work with internationally renounced scientists from world class institutions like CDC, Atlanta, thereby increasing our global visibility and providing us with future opportunities for various international collaborations in the field of Virology,” said Dr Kumar.
source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com / Deccan Chronicle / Home> News> Current Affairs / DC / August 25th, 2013