The decision was taken at the two-day first-ever conference of health ministers of Saarc, which ended here yesterday.

The system will be modelled on the pattern of the one already devised by India which is proposed to be launched on December 25.

It envisages introduction of an emergency mobile hospital that could be airlifted to any place for extending emergency medical help, Indian Health Minister Sushma Swaraj told reporters here Saturday evening.

She said the conference also agreed to establish a Saarc Disease Surveillance Centre to continuously keep an watch on the profile of the diseases, particularly communicable diseases, from all member countries and collection of data on the diseases.

The purpose behind the idea of the Center is to enable Sssrc countries to get prompt warnings in the event of an outbreak of any epidemic, Swaraj added. The meeting decided to make the prestigious Indian medical institution National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) the nodal agency for the Saarc's malaria control programme.

Under the Saarc anti-malaria campaign, all important laboratories in countries of the region would be networked, Swaraj said.

The Saarc health ministers also braced for facing the WTO regime in medicines by deciding to evolve a regional digital library storing knowledge about a range of traditional medicinal systems practiced in South Asia in order to guard against piracy.

Swaraj said India would lead the initiative for the library since it already has developed the required expertise and set up such a mechanism storing 36,000 formulations of the Ayurveda system of medicine and is in the process of creating similar arrangements for Unani, homeopathy and Siddha systems.

Director General of India's Council for Industrial and Scientific Research R A Mashelkar will interact with officials of other Saarc members on the issue.

Bangladesh made a strong plea for a joint regional drive to eradicate once for all deadly diseases like malaria, dengue and polio, which could return time and again unless tackled effectively.

Though Bangladesh, for example, has completely eradicated polio, its existence in a single country can not only endanger the entire South Asian region but the larger world as well, said Bangladesh Acting High Commissioner Shahadat Hossain, representing his country in the conference.

Bangladesh also called for cooperation among the regional countries in the fields of education, training and research in the health sector with possible allocation of scholarships or fellowships.

It also called for cooperation in quality control of drugs, food supplements, pharmacopoeias and formularies.

Bangladesh Health Minister Khondakar Musharraf Hossain could not attend the conference because of "pressing preoccupations" at home, it was officially stated.

The health ministers also decided to meet every year and the next exercise will be held in Islamabad.