India Committed to End Tuberculosis by 2025: Union Health Minister

Under the government's initiative, over 15,000 more tuberculosis (TB) cases have been detected, said, Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda at the "1st WHO Global Ministerial Conference on Ending TB in Sustainable Development Era".

"We have already completed two campaigns covering 257 districts and screened over 30 million vulnerable persons and detected over 15,000 fresh TB cases. We are planning the next campaign in December this year. We will now be mounting interventions for TB in urban slum areas through the Urban Health Mission," said Nadda.

‘The Health Minister re-affirmed India's commitment to eliminating TB by 2025.’

Nadda stated to provide access to patients in difficult-to-reach areas, both socially and geographically, the government had started active TB case finding campaigns in selected areas.

"India is a major manufacturer of anti-TB drugs for the world with almost 80 percent global market share. We give only the best quality drugs to our patients, whether within the country or abroad. There is a wide scope for us to sit together and discuss seriously about promoting generic drugs for TB patients all over the world," said Nadda.

According to a previous report, "An estimated 279,000 patients were diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) in India and 423,000 died of the highly contagious lung disease in 2016."

The WHO estimates that there were 600,000 new cases of resistance to rifampicin - the most effective first-line drug, of which 490,000 had MDR-TB. Almost half of these cases were in India, China and the Russian Federation.

The WHO report said that India's funding for tuberculosis prevention, control and treatment programme substantially increased in 2017 to $525 million, "almost double the level of 2016".

"The budget is fully funded, including US$ 387 million (74%) from domestic sources (triple the amount of US$ 124 million in 2016) and the remainder (26%) from international donor sources," it said.

Chances of tuberculosis in HIV positive patients is high because their immune systems are weakened, with 10% of the estimated 10.4 million new TB cases worldwide being of people living with HIV.

Even though there was a drop of 4% compared to 2015, still an estimated 1.7 million people died from TB, including nearly 400,000 people who were co-infected with HIV.

Source: Medindia