TB drops globally, wreaks havoc in India

NEW DELHI: First the good news — the number of people who fell ill with tuberculosis globally dropped to 8.8 million in 2010, after peaking at nine million in 2005. However, in India, the disease still wreaked havoc. It infected over 15 lakh people in 2010 and killed over three lakh.

According to new data, published on Wednesday in the WHO 2011 global tuberculosis control report, India’s case detection rate in 2010 was just about 60%. What’s most worrying is that 73,000 of the notified new TB cases were already multi-drug resistant. Of this less than 3,000 were detected . Globally, it is estimated that 3.3% of all new TB cases had MDR-TB in 2009. Each year, about 4.4 lakh MDR-TB cases are estimated to emerge and 1.5 lakh persons with MDR-TB die.

However , according to WHO, 2.1% of all new cases in India are MDR-TB while as many as 15% of retreatment TB cases are developing MDR-TB .

WHO’s director-general Dr Margaret Chan said, “The challenge now is to pay particular attention to the growing threat of multidrug-resistant TB.” The number of new TB cases has tripled in high HIV prevalence countries in the last two decades.

TB is the leading cause of death among people living with HIV. In 2009, 3.8 lakh people died of HIV-associated TB. It is also the most common illness among people living with HIV, including those who are taking antiretroviral treatment

In India, only 32% of TB patients know their HIV status . Just about two lakh HIV positive people have been screened for TB.
The WHO report says at least one-third of the 33.3 million people living with HIV worldwide are infected with TB. Persons co-infected with TB and HIV are 20-30 times more likely to develop active TB disease than persons without HIV.