Tuberculosis continues to exist on an epic scale in India, entrenched as our biggest public health problem, revealed an expert on March 18.

National Tuberculosis Control Programme Advisor Dr Naresh Purohit revealed this while delivering a key note address as a guest speaker at the National Workshop on Battle Against TB organised by the Assam Medical College, Dibrugarh. The physician said that India still has the most TB cases in the world (2.8 million) amongst the most MDR-TB cases (over 1lakh cases) the most deaths from TB of any country (2.8 lakh a year) and a staggering annual economic loss (24 billion dollars or Rs 1.6 Iakh crore) from this one disease.

Talking to UNI over phone from Dibrugarh after presenting the paper, Dr Purohit said he had emphasised that Multi-Drug-Resistant (MDR)TB seems so widespread and pervasive in some urban areas of metro cities of India that it threatens to sabotage all the progress made by DOTS (Direct Observed Therapy). "The MDR patients often remain undetected, continue to live in densely crowded slums of metro towns, travel in crowded buses and trains and work in poorly ventilated offices, thus transmitting these deadly strains through our crowded cities.

An average TB or MDR-TB patient will infect 10-20 others a year before eventually dying and thus the epidemic  spreads unabated," he added. Dr Purohit quoted from his research report at the workshop that there was a budgetary allocation to provide nutritional support for TB patients and efforts were on to rope in the private sector which diagnoses and treats most of India's TB cases. "Whilst the government and the programme have made progress, there are miles to go and promises to keep and that India will be hard pressed to keep to the official mantra of eliminating TB by 2030," he concluded.