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Belying her
cool and friendly demeanour is a public officer
who is ever ready to spring into action. In fact,
Lalitha Kurupatham is often on call 24 hours a day.
The moment the telephone rings, she will activate
her team which will be operationally ready within
two hours. But Lalitha is not from the army nor
the police force. Instead, she is a health executive
from the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) Disease
Control Branch.
One of Lalitha’s core duties is to supervise,
oversee and manage
MOH’s Contact Tracing Centre, which was set
up last year during the SARS crisis.
At the moment, there are no public health emergencies
that require contact tracing. But Lalitha and her
team of part-time contact tracers, many of whom
are working in the Health Promotion Board (HPB)
and Health Sciences Authority, will “drop
everything if there’s a case”.
In the interim, Lalitha regularly conducts training
to refresh the team’s knowledge as well as
to update them on changes to the systems.
Sharing about her own experience in contact tracing,
she said: “I joined MOH at the tail end of
the SARS crisis last year. There was not much to
do then. However, I did have the opportunity to
work on the two cases that happened after that —
the lab case and the Taiwan case.
“We
stayed till late to make calls. It was tiring and
very stressful because the whole country was counting
on us to make sure everything was ok.”
Now that there is no pressing public health emergency
to handle,
Lalitha devotes most of her working hours to her
core function, which is disease control.
She conducts epidemiological investigations into
various diseases like dengue, typhus and malaria.
Simply put, when a case occurs, she will find out
all about three key aspects: time, person and place.
For example, when someone contracts dengue, she
will conduct telephone interviews to find out when
the symptoms began appearing, the likely places
the person got bitten by the Aedes mosquito
and details of the person such as his name, race,
age and occupation.
On occasion, Lalitha conducts field investigations
to assist the National Environment Agency (NEA)
to locate the places where the Aedes mosquito
is breeding.
She also performs routine blood screening for malaria
at places like construction sites and rural areas
where the Anopheles (malaria) mosquito
may be found.
“The whole of Singapore was declared
malaria free by the World Health Organisation in
1982. Our job is to keep it so,” said Lalitha.
“Malaria is high on the radar here. We do
see a lot of cases in Singapore but they are mostly
imported ones. Local cases are very, very rare.”
Although it has only been slightly over a year since
Lalitha joined MOH, she has had a hand in many other
projects.
An ongoing pilot study with HPB and the NEA to learn
more about dengue is one. Another was conducting
research and delivering a scientific presentation
on a dengue outbreak to doctors at the Academy of
Medicine.
More recently, she was the emcee for the opening
ceremony of a public health conference for officials
from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and
Thailand.
She said, “The whole branch was involved.
We stayed at the hotel where the conference was
held for two nights and worked from 6 am to 1 am!”
Nonetheless, this Public Service Commission scholar
is happy to take on all the challenges that her
job offers.
“My bond is four years
but I don’t plan to leave when my bond ends.
I would be happy to stay in this field that is ever
changing. Just think about SARS and Avian flu that
broke out last year. We have to expect the unexpected
to a large extent,” she said.
“Our branch has dealt with Nipah virus and
all the weird things that
have happened in the past few years. It’s
exciting and I don’t expect to get bored!” |
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