A Parliamentary panel has cast doubts over the Government’s ability to eliminate tuberculosis by 2025 in view of poor primary healthcare infrastructure and unregulated private healthcare leading to irrational use of TB drugs in the country.
led by Rajya Sabha MP Ram Gopal Yadav, the Parliamentary panel also observed that the main challenges confronting the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP), the Government’s scheme, are prevalence of high levels of disease transmission and increase in incidence of drug resistant TB.
“The Committee is of the view that this is due to poor primary healthcare infrastructure in rural areas and unregulated private healthcare leading to irrational use of first-line and second-line anti-tuberculosis drugs. The Committee would therefore like the Government to focus their strategy on addressing these issues,” it said in the report submitted in Parliament recently.
The Millennium Developments Goals (MDG) target for tuberculosis, to half the prevalence and mortality rates by 2015 compared with the baseline of 1990 was achieved by the RNTCP as mentioned in the WHO’s Global TB Report 2015.
The Committee noted that despite passage of so much time since the launch of RNTCP, India continues to have the highest TB burden in the world and drug-resistant TB is 2.5 per cent in new cases and 16 per cent in previously treated TB cases.
The Government, in its reply, said that the National Strategic Plan for Tuberculosis (2017-2025) which targets elimination of the deadly disease by 2025 focusses on addressing the issues of strengthening infrastructure and service delivery and also to ensure active engagement with the private sector.
India has the highest tuberculosis burden in the world, accounting for nearly one-fourth of the global incidence. According to the government data, there were 53 MDR-TB patients in 2012 which rose to 5000 in 2014.
Also in case of XDR-TB, there were 32 patients in 2012 which increased to 240 in 2014. In 2012, out of the estimated global annual incidence of 8.7 million TB cases, 2 to 2.4 million were estimated to have occurred in India.
A recent survey by a research company, Chrome Data Analytics and Media, in six metropolitan cities Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune and Bangalore reveals more yet to be done. It said that at least 64 per cent of the respondents said that they do not think the Government is allocating enough funds to eradicate tuberculosis.
Untimely diagnosis and treatment initiative and multi drug resistance were the top two factors making TB
one of the biggest killers in the country while more than half of the total respondents India is not equipped enough to handle the deadly disease as an epidemic, as per the survey.