india

Updated: Mar 24, 2019 23:30 IST

With the government focus shifting towards private sector engagement, the percentage of tuberculosis (TB) notifications from the private sector increased by 35% in 2018 as compared to the year 2017, shows government data released on Sunday on the occasion of the World TB Day.

The new case notifications from the public sector has also gone up by 10%.

Drug resistant TB remains an area of concern, with 54% increase in the cases that came up to 60,000 new cases in 2018 as compared to 40,000 in 2017.

“The rise in TB percentages need not alarm us; rather it is a positive sign for the TB elimination efforts that we have been able to track these many drug resistant patients and put them on treatment. These people otherwise would have infected many others within the community,” said Dr Kuldeep Singh Sachdeva, deputy director general, central TB division, Union health ministry. While the World Heath Organization (WHO) objective is to eliminate TB by 2030, India has set an ambitious target of eliminating TB by 2025.

Elimination, defined as bringing down new infections to less than one case per 100,000 population, is possible only when patients get diagnosed and cured without stopping treatment that exponentially raises their risk of developing drug resistance.

As per the current government estimates calculated in 2017, India reported 204 new cases per 100,000 population.