Tag: TB

  • After Covid, India faces an uphill battle to meet PM Modi’s goal of ending TB by 2025

    By AFP

    MUMBAI: When Covid-19 ripped through India in 2020-21, several million people are thought to have died. Desperate efforts to stem the pandemic hurt the battle against another huge killer: tuberculosis.

    India is the home to a quarter of the world’s TB infections and an estimated half a million people died of the curable lung disease in 2020 in the South Asian nation — a third of the global toll.

    Because of the pandemic, global deaths from the “silent killer” rose in 2020 for the first time in more than a decade, reversing years of progress, the World Health Organization says.

    In India, the number of new cases detected in 2020 actually fell by a quarter to around 1.8 million due to Covid restrictions and as the pandemic diverted resources.

    Nearly two-thirds of people with TB symptoms did not seek treatment, according to a 2019-21 nationwide government survey released on World TB Day on Thursday.

    Ashna Ashesh, 29, diagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis four years ago, saw how patients, many isolated and jobless because of lockdowns, struggled for support.

    ALSO READ | Tuberculosis on the rise in Covid survivors in Karnataka

    “They were incredibly afraid… They were reaching out for any kind of information that could be offered about how to access tests and medication,” the public health professional with the Survivors Against TB collective told AFP.

    “The impact has been immense… Covid has set back the fight against TB quite significantly. A recovery plan for TB is critical, both in India and globally.”

    India now faces an uphill battle to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of ending the spread of TB by 2025, five years earlier than the UN’s target.

    Experts and survivors are calling for intensive grassroots campaigns to find “missing” cases, more vaccine funding and support to combat malnutrition, a major trigger for TB.

    Kuldeep Singh Sachdeva from the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease said states need to increase services such as house-to-house visits and mass screenings.

    “That’s the only way now where you can eliminate TB,” Sachdeva, who previously led the government’s National Tuberculosis Elimination Program, told AFP.

    Silver lining

    Officially Covid has killed almost 520,000 Indians, but experts believe the true toll to be far higher.

    The pandemic — which saw Covid replace TB as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — did however have one silver lining: increased mask-wearing.

    Sachdeva estimates this might have cut TB transmission by 20 percent. Additional diagnostic machines procured for Covid could be redeployed for TB, he added.

    ALSO READ | Post-Covid, tuberculosis cases among young population increasing in Delhi

    Mumbai — a megapolis of 20 million people and a TB hotspot — has rolled out a programme with young survivors such as Seema Kunchikorve, who was diagnosed with TB five years ago at 20, to keep current patients on track with medications.

    “The treatment has a lot of (side) effects which patients can’t take,” Kunchikorve told AFP during a TB awareness play staged at a school in India’s biggest slum Dharavi.

    Vijay Chavan, who treats patients with drug-resistant TB at a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) clinic in Mumbai, said the Covid battle had shown the way to fight the older pandemic.

    At the clinic, which treats children as young as five, patients spend hours undergoing check-ups beside brightly coloured wallpapers featuring famous comic characters, before collecting a large tray of pills for their treatments.

    “If there is a political will for TB, just like Covid, it definitely will give us good results,” he said.

  • Researchers from BRICS nations to study impact of severe Covid on TB patients

    By PTI

    NEW DELHI: BRICS countries are working on a programme to study the impact of severe COVID-19 conditions on tuberculosis (TB) patients, the Department of Biotechnology said on Monday. 

    The SARS-CoV-2 NGS (Next Generation Sequencing)-BRICS consortium is an interdisciplinary collaboration to advance COVID-19 health-relevant knowledge and to contribute to improvements in health outcomes, it said.

    The consortium, comprising researchers from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), will accelerate translation of genomic data from clinical and surveillance samples, the government’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT) said.

    This will be done utilising high-end genomic technologies, and epidemiologic and bioinformatics tools and this information will be used in diagnostic assays and tracking transmission dynamics of COVID-19 and other viruses, as well as lead to clinical and public health research and interventions, it said.

    “The Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, in collaboration with BRICS countries is implementing the SARS-CoV-2 NGS-BRICS consortium and multi-centric programme to study the impact of severe COVID-19 conditions on TB patients,” the DBT said.

    The Indian team has members from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (Prof. Arindam Maitra, Prof. Saumitra Das, Dr. Nidhan K Biswas), the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (Dr. Ashwin Dalal) and the Indian Institute of Science (Dr. Mohit K Jolly), it said.

    Dr. Ana Tereza Ribeiro de Vasconcelos of Brazil’s National Laboratory for Scientific Computation, Prof. Georgii Bazykin of Russia’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Prof. Mingkun Li of China’s Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Tulio de Oliveira of South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal are the other members of the consortium, the DBT said.

    In a second multi-centric programme, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from India, Brazil and South Africa will investigate the impact of severe COVID-19 on transient peripheral immunosuppression and lung hyperinflammation conditions in TB patients for epidemiology and comorbidity, the department said.

    This team consists of members from the India’s National Institute of Research in Tuberculosis (Dr. Subash Babu, Dr. Anuradha Rajamanickam, Dr. Banurekha Velayutham and Dr. Dina Nair).

    Besides them, the members from Brazil are Dr. Valeria Cavalcanti Rolla and Dr. Adriano Gomes da Silva of the Lapclin-Tb/ INI-FIOCRUZ, Dr. Maria Cristina Lourenço of the LBB/INI-FIOCRUZ and Dr. Bruno de Bezerril Andrade from IGM-FIOCRUZ; and from South Africa are researchers Dr. Bavesh Kana, Dr. Bhavna Gordhan, Dr. Neil Martinson and Dr. Ziyaad Waja of the University of the Witwatersrand, the DBT said.

    “This collaborative study is expected to provide valuable co-morbidity data pertaining to pulmonary TB patients with or without COVID-19 co-infection that is expected to be generated for better disease management,” it said.

    Secretary in the DBT Renu Swarup said the department has taken small steps in the right direction towards collaboration with BRICS countries.