Abstract

TUBERCULOSIS: CURRENT SCENARIO & CHALLENGES IN INDIA

Sunita Patel* and Manisha N. Sodha

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Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable disease that is a major cause of ill health and one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Until the corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic, TB was the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, ranking above HIV/AIDS. The most obvious impact is a large global drop in the number of people newly diagnosed with TB and reported. This fell from 7.1 million in 2019 to 5.8 million in 2020, an 18% decline back to the level of 2012 and far short of the approximately 10 million people who developed TB in 2020. 16 countries accounted for 93% of this reduction, with India, Indonesia and the Philippines the worst affected. Major challenges to control TB in India include poor primary health-care infrastructure in rural areas of many states; unregulated private health care leading to widespread irrational use of first-line and second-line anti-TB drugs; spreading HIV infection; lack of political will; and, above all, corrupt administration. Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) is another emerging threat to TB eradication and is a result of deficient or deteriorating TB control program. For this review article, data available at the official websites of WHO; and from the Ministry of Health, Government of India, were consulted, and search engines PubMed® and Google Scholar® were used.

Keywords: Tuberculosis, National TB Program, Multidrug-resistant TB, RNTCP (revised national TB control program).