Mumbai: The state health services officials stated that there is an urgent need to spread awareness about tuberculosis (TB). They also emphasised that TB claims more lives than swine flu every year.
Private practitioners should report the TB cases to government authorities to ensure that patients get proper treatment. The joint director of TB & Leprosy and state TB officer Dr Padmaja Jogewar said that according to the Global TB Report 2018, an estimated 4.1 lakh people die of TB every year in India.
The government officials noted that private practitioners are not reporting cases to state’s health centres. Hence, they have now made it mandatory for private doctors to report the cases of TB.
Laying emphasis on awareness regarding TB, Dr Jogewar said, “Almost 1.9 lakh tuberculosis (TB) cases are diagnosed in the state every year. Of them, 1.3 lakh cases are being notified by public healthcare units, and 60,000 are being reported by private medical practitioners.”
“The Central government has aimed to ‘End TB by 2025’. The National Strategic Plan (NSP) for tuberculosis elimination 2017 to 2025 lays out a roadmap for identifying the ‘missing million’ TB cases and averting the deaths due to the disease in India every year,” said Dr Jogewar.
She added the NSP lays out bold steps to move toward TB elimination, mandating notification of all TB cases, integrating the programme with general health services and expanding and streamlining diagnostics and multi-drug resistant-TB and TB-HIV services.
Maharashtra was the first large state to be fully covered under the Revis-ed National TB Control Program (RNTCP) in 2003. The state has 79 re-porting units, three state TB training and demonstration centres and three state drug stores.
