The National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases (NITRD) in New Delhi, in association with BD, a leading global medical technology company, has established a Centre of Excellence for TB Diagnostics and will jointly conduct training programs and workshops to offer an opportunity to learn and practice in a world class laboratory.

NITRD is the National Reference laboratory under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare in TB and provides tertiary hospital care for patients suffering from tuberculosis (TB). It functions primarily towards patient healthcare and strategy framework in line with the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) that is the state-run TB control initiative of the Government of India, said a release here.

Dr. V P Myneedu, medical superintendent and HOD Microbiology, NITRD, hoped that the training programmes will help government as well as private institutions and professionals to learn and understand the basic and advancements in tuberculosis diagnosis, and disease management.

Comprising six trainings through the year (the first training was conducted in January 2014), lab technicians, microbiologists and chest physicians will experience hands-on training on diagnosis and management of TB. The trainings will continue all-round the year in different aspects of laboratory diagnosis of TB, relevant to TB, MDR-TB, XDR-TB management under RNTCP and Programmatic Management of Drug resistant TB (PMDT).

Dr Sanjay Sarin, regional director, Global Health, Asia Pacific BD said, “India has made great progress in TB control over the last few years. Although RNTCP is investing in building the laboratory capability,  management of MDR/XDR-TB remains a challenge and in that respect building laboratory capacity for TB culture and Drug susceptibility test (DST) has been identified as a critical step to enable scale-up of PMDT.”

The centre has conducted trainings on culture and isolation of mycobacterium TB which was a five-day course and addressed hands-on training on liquid culture isolation & differentiation. The trainees were provided complete knowledge of setting up of TB laboratory, biosafety in a laboratory, specimen collection, transport, specimen processing, and reporting. It also conducted a two-day diagnosis and management of drug resistant TB programme for chest physicians and clinicians, recently.