This week, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya restated the Government’s commitment to working towards a TB-free India by 2025. How plausible is this ambition? “[The] Government and people will work together to make India TB-Free by 2025,” the Minister told lawmakers in the Rajya Sabha. He emphasised the need to raise awareness of tuberculosis as […]
XDR-TB
TB mortality: A nineteen percent reduction
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]