8 lakh tuberculosis patients in India still out of treatment regimen
NEW DELHI: A whopping 8 lakh patients of tuberculosis are still missing out on treatment in India which continues to carry the highest burden of the highly infectious bacterial disease globally.
According to the India TB report, 2019 released on Wednesday, 5.5 lakh TB patients are still “undetected” while 2.5 lakh notified patients are still to begin treatment regimen even after being identified.
The report said that the estimated TB incidence in India is 27 lakh. In 2018, the Revised National TB Control Programme was able to achieve a notification of 21.5 lakh, marking a 16 per cent increase as compared to 2017 and the highest so far.
Of the total notification, 25 per cent or 5.4 lakh cases were from the private sector — a 40 per cent increase from last year. Among the notified, treatment was initiated for about 19.1 lakh cases across both public and private sectors.
India has set a goal of eliminating TB by 2025 — five year ahead of the global target.
As per the report, the characteristics of the affected population largely remain similar with the majority of the patients being in the 15-69 age group. HIV co-infection among TB patients was nearly 50,000 cases amounting to TB HIV co-infection rate of 3.4 per cent.
During 2017, 13,64,562 patients were notified as drug-resistant TB patients and the treatment success rate of 79 per cent was achieved amongst them, the report said.
The government also sought to identify and enrol the missing TB patients through a community-led initiative ‘TB haarega, desh jitega’ (TB will get defeated, the country will win).
“By employing a multi-sectoral and community-led approach, we are building a national movement to eliminate TB by 2025,” said Union health minister Harsh Vardhan.
“We have accordingly increased resource allocation toward the by four-folds and are confident of achieving our targets.”
He also launched an all-oral regimen kit for multi-drug resistant TB patients.