TB In India: The New Dangers | Nothing But The Truth With Raj Chengappa

foreign from India today and your host for nothing but the truth every week we will deal with key issues of concern and bring you perspectives and clarity as to why these matter to you and what is the clear truth that emerges [Music] while we all have been engrossed in battling the covet pandemic another killer disease continues to take a heavy toll I'm talking about tuberculosis or TB that every year kills more people in India than what covert has done in the past three years TB now accounts for close to half a million deaths annually in India yet while we look and we all look at covert as a National Emergency we somehow don't regard the rising cases and debts by TB as one of them so in this episode of nothing but the truth we will deal about the new dangers that TB poses to India and what we need to do to eradicate this modern day plague most of us are familiar with the term TB but it's good to get some Basics out of the way the disease has been recorded from ancient times in India and is caused by a bacteria called mycobacterium tuberculosis TB spreads throughout the air when an infected person coughs speaks or sneezes though it usually affects the lungs it can also impact other parts of the body such as the kidney the brain liver and even the spine TB is a highly contagious disease and people with certain types of active TB can infect as many as 5 to 15 people who come close contact with them however not everyone who has the TB bacteria in their system develops TB the disease the most common symptoms are persistent cough blood in the sputum unexplained weight loss fever and chills if untreated disease can progress and become deadly it could cause severe damage to the lungs the bones the spinal cord the brain the liver kidneys and even the heart mortality rates of untreated TB is also very high while TB has been with us for decades why do we now have to worry about this disease firstly it was earlier known as a poor man's disease but today TB has become the great leveler striking not just the poor but afflicting the middle class and the rich in large numbers as well secondly India has the highest number of TB cases in the world we have 2.5 million cases being Afflicted with TB annually and India now accounts for almost a quarter of the total of 10 million TB cases in the world in India almost 400 000 people die of TB every year which is almost a third of the total of 1.4 million deaths caused by TB in the world thirdly and this is the biggest worry that India has the dubious distinction of having the highest number of cases of what is called drug resistant tuberculosis these are known as multi-drug resistant TB cases for short and have been growing rapidly in recent years in India a quarter of the total patients now have developed what is called multi-drug resistant TB my colleague sonali achajaji who has written a cover story on India today on TV recently points out that drug resistant TB is the main reason why the disease continues to spread and cause Havoc across the country treatment for TB and I'm putting it simply is done normally in two phases in the first phase a set of four first-line drugs are prescribed for two months then in the second phase the patient has to take three of the first line of the four first-line drugs for another four months so it's a total of six months now Dr C Padma priyadarshini director of the icmr National Institute for research in tuberculosis in Chennai told India today that there are three main reasons why TB cases continue to increase and also develop drug resistance in India the first is the delay in patients approaching a health facility when they have the symptoms the main problem is the social stigma associated with TB and this is why the disease goes somewhat undiagnosed and also people don't want to report it this makes early and prompt diagnosis difficult the second is irregular treatment and the third is discontinuing of the medication before the prescribed cost ends which then leads to drug resistant TB now just remember that there are almost six months that firstly the patient has to take these tablets every day which means that even if they miss one or two days they could develop into drug resistant cases now because of the rapid rise of drug resistant TB this variant of the bacteria is spreading to new patients who have to be treated by newer and more powerful drugs now there are relatively fewer drugs to treat drug resistant TB and new drugs are not widely available and this is the problem also the newer drugs are far more toxic causing side effects including gastritis headache peripheral neuropathy and depression a detailed National TB survey done recently showed that 64 percent of TB symptomatic individuals did not seek Health Care another 60 percent of them revealed that they ignored symptoms of TB 18 said they didn't recognize the symptoms to be those of TB and 12 chose to self-medicate and not take the regular drugs the survey concluded that 56 percent of the estimated drug resistant patients were undiagnosed and 64 percent of these cases went untreated that is an alarming figure to give you an idea of how dangerous TB is let's take an example of devshree lokhande a 32-year architect from Puna in an interview with sonali acharge of India today depshi said that she was diagnosed with TB in 2014 and was immediately put on TB medicines but her condition continued to worsen doctors found her TB resistant to three of the medicines in the standard four drug kit that I had mentioned earlier as they struggled to find a medicine that would work devshree's entire left lung was destroyed within just six months and the other infected as well desperate the family approached a doctor at hinduja hospital in Mumbai debshi was prescribed a new set of expensive medications that were just being tested which he received on compassionate grounds it took three years of physical struggle grappling with severe side effects such as loss of hearing and the financial burden of getting a cochlear implant for deepshi to finally recover now she lives an almost normal life but she still shudders when she remembers the tough period She faced one of them was that the expenses for patients for drug resistant TB can be very crippling treatment of drug resistant TB can take up to two years compared to six months for regular TB and over that period doctors say that the patient needs to take around 14 000 pills that amounts to roughly 20 pills a day and costs for treating drug resisting TB can be as high as rupees 25 lakh for two years in comparison patients currently on treatment for standard or normal TB need to spend around rupees 7500 in in the public sector and in the private sector is a little more expensive it's around twenty thousand rupees that is why it is important that we contained the number of drug resistant TB patients in India so what is the country doing about the new dangers posed by TB India's national tuberculosis elimination program has been running for over 50 years now prime minister Narendra Modi had pressed the accelerator pedal so to speak on eradicating TB altogether in the country in Varanasi in March this year that's just three months ago the Prime Minister reiterated India's commitment to eliminate TB by 2025 that's two years from now this year or this 2025 figure was five years ahead of the target set by the United Nations for the global eradication of TB worldwide the Prime Minister also launched a TB booked panchayat initiative to bring efforts to eliminate the disease down to the last Village as part of this initiative the support of 250 000 gram panchayats will be enlist enlisted to create awareness about TB and also monitor Service delivery or Healthcare delivery for TB now last year president raupadi murmu launched the Pradhan mantri t which allows ministers celebrities businessmen corporates and ngos to adopt TB patients and become niksha nikshay mitras what they do is they help mobilize Financial Resources for them and currently the government says nearly seven seventy five thousand people and organizations are part of the scheme and over 1 million patients have been adopted in this method the government is also enlisting what they call TB vijetas people who have conquered the disease to educate people and give emotional support to patients unlike regular TB it can be challenging to map the full extent of drug resistant TB because it requires specialized testing to detect early diagnosis is a critical Frontier that the government is also focusing on unlike regular TB it can be challenging to map the full extent of drug resistant TB because it requires specialized test to detect these tests are often expensive and not widely available meanwhile new testing technology called true Nat Nat and CB Nat which is n a double A T are game changers for the rapid and accurate diagnosis of TB I'm not going to expand on these abbreviations for those diagnostic facilities but the expansion of these diagnostic facilities by the government has been enormous the government has been pumping money to hiring into hiring people and building infrastructure for it and the number of true Nat and CB Nat facilities in the country has gone up from 40 in 2014 to over 5 000 now apart from that all the 34 states and union territories in the country conducted door-to-door campaigns under which 223 million people were screened and 73 772 additional TB patients were identified and this was in 2021 various state governments have now started building private Partnerships to improve diagnosis haryana is showing the way with Guru Gram's medanta Hospital working with the state in the mission to end TB by 2025. medanta chairman Dr naresh 3han told India today and I quote him we realized conventional x-rays are not reliable for diagnosis and rural areas in the state needed digital x-ray technology so we created mobile Vans equipped with digital X-rays and other Technologies for quick diagnosis of drug resistant TB at close quartz and we believe that such Partnerships will be key to helping Great India of The Scourge in an encouraging observation the India TB reported noted that of the people diagnosed with TB in 2021 almost 95.5 percent were put on treatment since affordability is a bottleneck the government has launched several schemes to help patients for instance the government provides financial assistance of rupees 500 per patient under the Nick share portion yojana and free medicines through the government hospitals around 7 million TB patients have got assistance with around 2 100 crores since 2018 under the scheme the Indian government remains determined to eliminate all forms of TB by 2025 and believes it is well on its way to achieving that Target according to the union health Ministry Kerala and Karnataka reduce cases by nearly 40 percent between 2015 and 2021 and in fact lakshadeep and budgam and District in Jammu and Kashmir were declared TB free in 2021 and overall Jammu and Kashmir has reduced cases by 20 percent India's recent efforts and initiatives are being lauded by the Global Alliance for TB but experts remains skeptical of its ambition to eradicate TB entirely in India in the next two years the goal of 2025 is strictly aspirational but what it does do is that it accelerates the momentum to eliminate a disease that has devastated India in recent decades and that is good news for more details on the Resurgence of TB in India and how it could be eradicated do read the cover story in India today written by my colleague sonali achaji on the subject thank you for listening to this episode of nothing but the truth I look forward to having you with me the next week foreign

Channel: India Today

Views: 3,703

Keywords: india, drug resistant tb, drug resistant tb india, drug resistant tb in india, drug resistant tb treatment in india, drug resistance tb in india, prevalence of drug resistant tb in india, drug resistance tb challenges in india, multidrug resistant tb in india, drug resistant tb mdr tb treatment, drug resistan, multi-drug resistant tb, drug resistant tuberculosis, mdr tb cases in india, can mdr tb cause death, multidrug resistant, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, death

Id: fd2lxmfZcz8

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2023