The 1/4/6x24 (one, four, six by 2024) campaign calls for TB patients to have access to evidence-based, long-awaited, shorter, less toxic treatment. But without mass availability of drugs, can India afford to adopt the protocol, ask experts.

Despite being a curable disease, TB can still be a stigmatizing illness, mainly due to people’s ignorance of its causes and transmission, states the NFHS report.

Given the complexity of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) diagnosis and care, a new study sought to address key knowledge gaps in MDR risk factors, care delays, and drivers of delay to help guide disease control.

More than half of all cases of TB every year — two-thirds of new cases in people 15-19 years old — can be prevented by ensuring people get enough to eat in terms of calories and proteins, studies have shown. So, there was a general cheer when the Budget made an allocation of Rs 600 crore towards nutritional support for TB patients. But experts were not sure whether this was enough.

Rural areas of Pune, for the first time, will be covered as part of the third round of the central government’s intensive drive to eliminate tuberculosis (TB) from the country by 2025. The drive, which will continue till December 18, will cover 24 districts in Maharashtra. The previous two rounds of the campaign were conducted in January and July this year, during which, over 15,000 more TB cases were detected from across the country.

In just a fortnight this July, an active search helped detect 110 “hidden” tuberculosis (TB) cases in Kashmir’s Udhampur district, another 280 in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district, and 106 TB cases in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur district. As part of the Central government’s Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme, which aims to eliminate tuberculosis by 2025, health authorities in different states had scanned 2 lakh people across 120 districts in the country and found as many as 9,203 previously unknown cases of the disease.

An intensified house-to-house search has picked up as many as 1,800 new tuberculosis (TB) cases across 50 high-risk districts in 18 states between January 15 to 31. From among 34 lakh people screened in the fortnight-long programme, at least 26,000 were identified with TB symptoms, with 1,800 confirmed cases so far. The sputum taken from others is currently being analysed. Nearly one million TB cases remain “missing” every year in the country for lack of diagnosis or treatment. “To end TB, we need to treat the missing cases and now trained health workers are doing a house-to-house search. So far, they have picked up 1,800 new patients in just a fortnight,” Dr Sunil Khaparde, Deputy Director General of Central TB Division said.

What is the VPM1002 tuberculosis vaccine?

Life came to a standstill when Marzia Dalal, a city-based corporate legal consultant and mother of two children, was diagnosed with Tuberculosis (TB) in her late 30s. She needed a stronger regimen to tackle the multi-drug resistant (MDR) strain as her initial treatment had failed.