The government will take into account MDR- TB patients going for treatment in the private healthcare institutions through its newly designed TB prevalence survey. It would be community based study designed currently with help from Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and involve of lakhs of patients.
Till date India has 71,000 notified MDR-TB cases. This comes in view of the fact that more than one million MDR TB cases go undetected or unreported globally.
Although India has an extensive national programme on TB diagnosis and treatment called as Revised National Tuberculosis Programme (RNTCP), there is an urgent need for reporting MDR- TB cases comprehensively.
TB prevalence survey involve collection of sputum samples and digital X-rays subject to symptoms found in the community being surveyed. Survey being planned would be a house-to- house survey for which statistical methods will be used to determine the sample size which will further be distributed across the country.
India has the highest tuberculosis burden in the world, accounting for nearly one-fourth of the global incidence with 2.3 million new cases annually. TB is a curable disease, yet it kills 1.5 million people worldwide annually, 1,40,000 of whom are children.
Implementation of research projects using more sensitive diagnostics like Genexpert has also been upscaled to pick up TB and MDR TB in children. Now there is also a thrust upon designing treatment regimens to offer optimal and shorter dosages for children suffering from TB.
Experts advocate that there is a need to have epidemiological data on TB through a nationwide surveillance as was done in China a few years ago. In India, death rates have also increased over the past several decades despite the official data showing 100 per cent coverage of Directly Observed Treatment, Short-Course (DOTS) programme in the country.
According to data available with Revised National Tuberculosis Programme, 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.