One of the distinct features of rural populace of the country, discontinuing medication process midway the moment some improvement is visible in the patient, has still remained a big challenge in combating Tuberculosis (TB) in states like Jharkhand. District TB Officer (Ranchi) Dr Vijay Bihari Prasad said on Thursday that this auto-developed habit of many patients has only retarded the process of getting the district and the State TB free.
“TB still remains the second largest life claiming reason only after accidents in India, with state like ours having no better data. We in India are losing at least two lives in every five minutes due to TB, despite having complete controlling capabilities over it if due process and period of medication is followed. But many patients drop medication process mid way due to a number of reasons, mostly because they start feeling better within first two months of medication and think that medication is not required after that,” said Prasad on Thursday.
Prasad added that as many as 502 Multi Drug Resistant (MDR)-TB suspects were tested in the district last year. “21 out of them were found positive, in which one lost its life. As far as total number of TB patients is concerned, we tested 18,564 TB suspects, in which 2,507 turned out to be patients, among which our success rate remained above 87% which is a good number,” said Prasad during divulging details of camps and awareness programmes scheduled on Friday on the occasion of World TB Day. Civil Surgeon (Ranchi) Dr Shivshanker Harijan, Medical Officer Dr NK Bhagat and other officials were also present on the occasion.
District Health Society –TB is organising health camps and awareness drives in as many as five locations in Ranchi on Friday. “These areas include Patthalkudwa, Hindpidi, Madhukam, Hatma and Islam Nagar, where our teams will carry health check ups for possible TB patients. Being densely populated and relatively low income group areas, people living there and around are always soft targets of communicable diseases, specially one of the highest communicable diseases like TB,” said Prasad. The team will also organise an awareness rally at 7:30 in the morning starting from Sadar Hospital campus to Kutchery Chowk and back to Sadar Hospital.
Harijan said that Ranchi was capable of fighting with TB with 25 cough testing centres and over 600 DOTS services providers, state of the art laboratory for MDR-TB testing and a number of other facilities. “I will only advice not to discontinue medication midway, specially when everything from testing to all the medicines come absolutely free for TB patients,” said Harijan.