In 2022, India had notified 24,22,121 TB cases, which the India TB report 2023 remarked as a “milestone year for TB surveillance efforts in India, with a record high notification”.

It is no longer known as the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP), and has been rechristened as the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programm.

To address the TB diagnostic challenges, a multi-institutional team has developed three cost-effective kits that improve the sensitivity of smear microscopy, enable transport of sputum samples at ambient temperature without using bio-safe containers, and extract DNA for diagnosing drug-resistant TB. The three kits are — TB Detect, TB Concentration & Transport, and TB DNA Extraction.

In a completely different approach to drug discovery, a team led by Dr. Samir K. Brahmachari, a J.C Bose National Fellow, at Delhi’s CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) has used a combination of approaches to predict potential drug targets in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the TB-causing bacteria. The novel method not only helps in speeding up drug discovery by finding potential, non-toxic drug targets but will also cost far less by reducing the chances of failure. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

What is it?

At the end of 50 years of tuberculosis control activities, the disease remains a major health challenge in India. As per new estimates, the number of new cases every year has risen to 2.8 million and mortality is put at 4,80,000 each year. These figures may go up when the national TB prevalence survey is undertaken in 2017-18. Against this backdrop, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in its national strategic plan for tuberculosis elimination (2017-2025), has set a highly ambitious goal of “achieving a rapid decline in burden of TB, morbidity and mortality while working towards elimination of TB by 2025.”

If there is already a long delay before TB patients in India start treatment, the Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) strategy offered by India’s TB control programme does not make it easy for patients to access and complete the treatment. In contrast, patients who took DOTS from private practitioners faced fewer barriers and were more likely to complete the treatment. The result were published recently in the journal BMC Health Services Research.

“TB is the leading infectious killer, yet countries still follow old and dangerous [TB diagnostic and treatment] polices,” MSF Access Campaign tweeted. In another tweet, MSF International said: “Outdated tuberculosis policies are risking further spread of drug-resistant TB.”

Thanks to the Zero TB Cities project, if all goes well, Chennai may drastically reduce TB mortality, shrink the number of new cases annually and impact TB prevalence in the city in a matter of 3-5 years.

Bedaquiline was the first TB drug to be discovered in more than 40 years, and the first one specifically for multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB). MDR-TB arises when the M. tuberculosis bacteria become resistant to two commonly used first-line TB drugs — isonazid and rifampicin.