The Centre has intensified its efforts to detect and treat people with tuberculosis (TB) through a focused 100-day campaign in 347 of the country’s most affected districts.

The Centre intends to end TB by 2025, ahead of the global 2030 deadline.

“There was a time when TB was considered as a ‘slow death’ and even family members suffering from TB were separated and isolated to prevent its spread. And since 1962, there have been many campaigns against TB, but, in 2018 the Hon’ble Prime Minister made the vision to end TB much before the 2030 deadline of the Sustainable Development Goals,” Union Health Minister JP Nadda said, launching the 100-day TB elimination campaign.

Pointing to efforts by the Centre, he said they had scaled up diagnostic services from 120 labs in 2014 to 8,293 laboratories today. The Centre also introduced drugs that had a shorter and more effective regimen, improving the TB treatment success rate to 87 percent, he said. Ni-kshay support worth Rs 3,338 crore had been provided through direct benefit transfer to over 1.17 crore TB patients, he said, adding that the Government had recently increased the Ni-kshay poshan amount from Rs 500 to Rs. 1000 and added energy boosters for TB patients.

The Centre has made it mandatory for private practitioners to notify any new TB patient to facilitate treatment. “This might look like a small step but it has led to an 8-fold increase in the rate of TB notifications in the private sector,” the Health Minister said.

Further, the Minister said the rate of TB decline in India had doubled from 8.3 per cent in 2015 to 17.7 per cent today, which is ahead of the global average. Deaths from TB also reduced significantly in India by 21.4 percent in the last 10 years, he added. .