Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan has touted India’s progress in reducing deaths due to tuberculosis (TB), with a nineteen percent reduction in TB mortality since the beginning of the decade. Affirming the Government’s commitment to eradicating TB by 2025 – five years ahead of global targets to reduce TB incidence by eighty percent and […]
MDR-TB
Drug resistant TB: 5 lakh and rising
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is an ever growing threat in India and globally. If not properly addressed, the situation presents a possibility of TB strains that are both infectious and all but untreatable plaguing both India as well as the rest of the globe. India accounts for 27 percent of the global disease burden due to […]
TB in India: Fewer cases but still the most in the world
Tuberculosis (TB) in India continues to be a major public health burden, even as cases have decreased. This is according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) report on TB, launched earlier this week, which provides an overview of how the world is tackling one of its dominant infectious disease challenges. The news is not […]
Sarcoidosis: All but a mystery in India
Sarcoidosis — a disease which involves inflammation within the lungs — is a relatively obscure health concern in India. It is rarely diagnosed and so prevalence rates are all but unknown. Concerningly, the disease may be adding to the development of drug resistance in strains of tuberculosis (TB). Sarcoidosis has a number of symptoms that […]
Hope for drug-resistant TB?
Tuberculosis (TB) or, more specifically, drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), is shaping up to be one of India’s foremost health concerns in the future. Studies claim that India accounts for 27 percent of the world’s 10.4 million new TB cases and 29 percent of the 1.8 million deaths globally. India also accounts for sixteen percent of […]
World TB Day: Will India show leadership in the fight against TB?
“It was something that I had never expected, I was really shocked,” Nandita Venkatesan said as she recalled finding out she had become re-infected with tuberculosis (TB) in 2013. It was six years after she was first diagnosed with the disease in 2007, some months before her eighteenth birthday. In a candid conversation profiled in […]
How Mumbai fares in the fight against TB
Drug resistance is one of the most pressing public health challenges facing India, especially when it comes to tuberculosis (TB). As the country grapples with one of the largest TB burdens in the world, rising cases of drug resistance presents an alarming trend. TB cases which become resistant to the most effective front-line drugs are […]
New Bedaquiline trial shows promising results
A new weapon in the fight against tuberculosis may have been found during a trial in Belarus. The drug, named Bedaquiline, was shown to have more than a ninety percent cure rate when given in combination with other TB medicines. By comparison, current TB drugs were shown to be effective in just over half of cases. Like […]
A TB-free India by 2025 – or a drug resistance epidemic?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to rid India of tuberculosis (TB) by 2025. This is an ambitious deadline five years in front of the global elimination deadline. Can this goal be achieved or is the new deadline simply political point scoring? The state of TB in India India has a bad track record in […]
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis to spike in India
Multi drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is to spike in India over the next twenty years, predicts a recent study published in The Lancet. The news puts the World Health Organization’s End TB strategy at risk of failure. It also jeopardises the pledge of the Indian government to end TB in the country by 2025. Unless […]