Official sources in the health ministry said that India has become the first country to develop its own mathematical system to estimate tuberculosis burden cases.
“Estimating tuberculosis (TB) burden especially in terms of incidence and mortality rates has never been an easy task, especially with poor overall reporting or when the coverage of case-based surveillance systems has not reached saturation levels. However, with the introduction and rapid scale-up of Ni-kshay (a case-based web-based monitoring system) in India since 2012, the quality of information on notification has been steadily improving,” an official source said on Tuesday.
Official sources also mentioned efforts in the last 9-10 years to increase program coverage, find missing cases and generate more evidence.
Laboratory services have been decentralized and augmented with high quality rapid diagnostic tests such as Nucleic Acid Amplification Tests (NAAT). With the scale of private sector engagement and mandatory notification, the coverage of private sector notification has increased by over 7 times has increased more since 2014.
“The initiation of active case finding has helped the country in community screening of vulnerable people and has given opportunity for early diagnosis, thereby reducing the per capita transmission rate in the community,” official sources said.
India also introduced a daily regimen for first-line treatment of tuberculosis
According to officials, India also introduced a daily regimen for first-line treatment of tuberculosis in 2017, harmonizing regulations in the public and private sectors that help universal access to TB care.
With Nirbhaya, tracking patients has helped improve treatment outcomes for all types of patients in both the public and private sector, including those who would otherwise have been at a loss for follow-up, said an official.
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