Will eradicate TB five years before global target: PM

India is pushing to eliminate tuberculosis (TB) five years ahead of a 2030 global target by adopting a “new approach and strategy”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Tuesday.

“India has set the goal of eliminating TB five years before 2030, in 2025, with a new approach and strategy,” the PM said while launching the TB-free India Campaign at the End-TB Summit in New Delhi on Tuesday.

The new strategy would involve an approach to reduce new cases and prevalence levels by 80% from the 2015 level and deaths from the disease by 90%.

The country is focusing on active screening and developing new diagnostic assays and medicine combinations to treat drugresistant infection to achieve its target. With 2.79 million cases, 423,000 deaths on an average, and 211 new infections per 100,000 people, India has the highest number of TB patients worldwide, WHO’s TB Report 2017 says.

To reach elimination levels, the government’s National Strategic Plan has a goal of reducing new TB cases to 44 per 100,000 people, from a baseline of 217 per 100,000 people in 2015.

The NSP also has the target to reduce prevalence to 65 per 100,000, an 80% reduction from the 2015 baseline of 320 per 100,000. And bring death down by 90% from 32 per 100,000 in 2015 to three per 100,000 in 2025.

Active screening with mobile TB vans is being used to detect undiagnosed infections. Over the past two years, the government has been able to screen 55 million people from 378 high-risk districts. “Through active screening, nearly 27,000 TB patients were found in these districts,” health minister JP Nadda said.

Modi said new vaccines and better diagnostics and medicines must be developed through the India TB Research Consortium.

“There needs to be focus on innovation and new technologies and developing platforms for disease management and treatment monitoring. In fact, India has developed an indigenous molecular diagnostic machine based on artificial intelligence, called TrueNat,” he said.

TrueNat has been developed for point-of-care situations, where there might be no electricity. It takes just two hours to diagnose TB and tell whether it is resistant to Rifampicin, the mainstay drug to treat an infection.

Early diagnostics is being boosted by setting up of more than 1,000 CBNAAT machines, also known as GeneXpert, a molecular diagnostic test that identifies bacteruium resistant to Rifampicin.

According to Dr K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, the main challenge will be to sensitise healthcare professionals at the primary care level to diagnose people based on symptoms and send them for tests.

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