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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Nov 01, 2017, 08:05 AM IST
India’s fight against tuberculosis has met with resounding defeat. The latest WHO report puts the country on top of the list of nations with maximum number of people afflicted with the dreaded disease.
The cold numbers point to a dismal performance despite the government’s claim to have ramped up efforts to contain the scourge. According to WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2017, the number of fatalities in India in 2016 (without HIV) was 4.23 lakh, a marginal dip when compared to the 2015 death toll of 4.8 lakh.
Seven nations, with India leading the pack, contributed to 64 per cent of the 1.04 crore deaths globally. Where has India gone wrong? Well, to begin with, at this rate of performance, things will get much worse in 2040 with an increased transmission of drug-resistant tuberculosis. And better access to treatment programmes may not be enough to eradicate the disease.
Success will also depend on other crucial factors such as early detection, getting patients to complete the course of treatment, and providing tailored medication depending on which drugs the strain is susceptible to.
That’s a humongous task for a public healthcare system that’s on the brink of collapse. With limited participation of private players — TB is a poor man’s disease — the job has been rendered all the more difficult. Though the government runs a national TB eradication programme and provides free medicines to nearly two million infected people via dispensaries, it is evident that such efforts have not yielded desired outcomes.
The World Bank has admitted that the cure for TB is both long and difficult. It involves nine months of medication for the drug-sensitive strain, and an even more exacting two-year-long treatment with a much stronger cocktail of drugs, at Rs 1 lakh per case, for the drug-resistant variety.
