World TB Day: 26L people contract TB in India every year, reveals study

Tribune News Service

PK Jaiswar

Amritsar, March 24

Even as the Union Government has initiated various programmes to make the country TB-free, the fight is far from over yet.

Reason: Delay in the arrival of patients to hospitals and delayed start to the treatment and patients leaving treatment midway.

The government has been striving to make the country TB-free by 2025 and it is running national TB eradication programme and has adopted detect, treat, prevent and build strategy.

“The need of the hour is to reach out the maximum number of people and identify patients and check their drug resistance under the universal drug sensitivity test, besides ensuring early arrival and completion of treatment course of every patient,” said Dr Naresh Chawla, former district TB officer and noted chest specialist.

He said, “We have to adopt intensified case finding and active case finding method. The government should visit slums, brick kilns, tribal areas and high-risk population for identifying new patients. By doing so, we can check the spread of the disease to 10 new persons.”

Sharing some data, he pointed out that around one-fourth of TB patients in the world were from India. He said around 100 lakh new patients were identified around the globe every year and about 15 lakh patients died due to this disease. He said in India every year 26 lakh people contracted the disease and around 1,000 patients died of it daily.

He said despite the government’s best efforts, the disease spread in the country like an epidemic. He said every year World Tuberculosis Day was observed globally on March 24 for spreading awareness on the disease which hit low- and middle-income countries.

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