Even though India has notified Tuberculosis, around nine lakhs Indians suffering from the deadly disease continue to be missed out from the country’s health system, as per the World Health Organisation.
In other words, the hospitals, clinics and private practitioners in the private sector are yet to respond to the Union Health Ministry’s notification issued last year. According to a WHO’s report on Tuberculosis 2013 released on Wednesday, about 75 per cent of the estimated 2.9 million missed cases — people who were either not diagnosed or diagnosed but not reported — were in 12 countries with India topping the list.
India has 31% of the global total missed cases followed by South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Myanmar. last year, India notified the disease which makes it mandatory for the private sector to report each TB case to the government registry.
Dr Mario Raviglione, WHO director of the Global TB Programme said “far too many people are still missing out on such care and are suffering as a result. They are not diagnosed, or not treated, or information on the quality of care they receive is unknown. WHO estimates that 75% of the three million missed cases are in 12 countries”.
India is presently home to around 26% of the world TB patients - 1 in 4 globally. According to the report, the disease killed 1.3 million people worldwide in 2012, while India alone accounted for 26 per cent of total TB cases. It found that global TB deaths decreased to 1.3 million in 2012, which is 100,000 less than the previous year.
There were an estimated 4.5 lakh new cases of multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) worldwide in 2012. More than half of these cases were in India, China and the Russian Federation. Around 94,000 TB patients eligible for multi-drug resistant (MDR-TB) treatment were detected in 2012: 84,000 people with confirmed MDR-TB (resistance to both rifampicin, the most powerful TB drug and isoniazid), along with 10,000 with rifampicin resistance detected using Xpert MTB/RIF.
This was a 42 per cent increase in detected cases eligible for treatment compared with 2011. In what is a matter of concern for India is that the largest increases between 2011 and 2012 were in India, South Africa and Ukraine. India saw 2.7 lakh deaths caused by TB in 2012, says the report.
India and South Africa together accounted for about one-third of global TB deaths. The five countries with the largest number of incident cases in 2012 were India (2 million), China (0.9 million), South Africa (0.4 million), Indonesia (0.4 million) and Pakistan (0.3 million), as per the report. India and China alone accounted for 26% and 12% of global cases, respectively.