PESHAWAR: As the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is in the throes of handling a dengue outbreak, a proposed legislation on mechanism for the control of diseases, surveillance, detection and reporting system has been caught in the bureaucratic red tape.

The officials claim that the KP Public Health (Surveillance and Response) Bill, 2017, sent to the law department since March this year for vetting awaits the desirable response.

They say after Peshawar saw an outbreak of dengue of late, the health department wrote a letter to the law department seeking urgent vetting of the draft law.

The letter, a copy of which is available with Dawn, shows that the health department shared the draft legislation with the law department for vetting on March 21.

Both the departments took over two months, on May 30 to be exact, to sit down to discuss the law. They decided that thehealth department would submit a revised draft of the bill to the law department.

The health department revised the draft and submitted it to the law department on June 19. The two departments had another meeting on it on July 31, where the health department was told to revise that draft, too.

`However, no significant progress has been made till now,` the letter said.

The health department has in its letter drawn the law department`s attention to the point that recent dengue outbreak could have been tackled under the same law in very effective manner as it focuses to provide diseases surveillance, detection and reporting system from grassroots to the provincial level which during the recent outbreak is undertaken, ironically, through the medium of mosque, hujra and school.

`In a nutshell, it is believed that if the draft bill is vetted on urgent basis it can help the provincial government to a considerable extent in resolving the menace of dengue,` it said.

The draft legislation provides for setting up 19 members KP Public Health Task Force, which will be headed by the provincial health minister.

The law empowers head of the task force to announce a public health emergency in the province or a specific part after consultation with director general health and WHO on information received from throughprovincial disease surveillance centre or other sources.

The legislation also provides for setting up provincial diseases surveillance centre in the province. The centre will be responsible to collect, receive and exchange information with district dieses surveillance centres.

Also, there will be district diseases surveillance centres at all district level to be headed by the district health officer.

The proposed Act also provides for the setting up of the district public health committees. The eight-member committees will be headed by the deputy commissioner of the respective district.

The committees will oversee the work of the district disease surveillance centres and to ensure implementation of its defined functions.

The provincial diseases surveillance centre will develop and implement a health hazard management system to identify, assess, investigate and manage health hazards in the environment collaboration with line departments.

After passage and enforcement, the proposed law will repeal the West Pakistan Epidemic Diseases Act, 1958.

When contacted, law secretary Mukhtiar Ahmed insisted that his department had vetted the draft legislation and sent it back to the health department.