The Union health ministry proposes to give a cash incentive of Rs 1,000 to private doctors for informing the government about every new case of tuberculosis, in order to find out about the lakhs of “missing” patients currently outside the treatment net.
At the same time, the state health departments are being asked to visit local medicine shops frequently to find these patients who are not registered with the government.
The Chhattisgarh government found 24,000 new TB patients who are not enrolled in the government programme only by visiting the pharmacies.
These suggestions were given by the health ministry to the state governments on Tuesday at a closed-door meeting on the sidelines of the ‘End TB Summit’, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi set up a 2025 deadline to get rid of TB in India.
TB is the nation’s biggest health threat killing 4.23 lakh Indians every year, which means nearly 1,100 Indians die each day due to TB.
“Morbidity (in TB) is high, but there is no reason why we should not be able to control the disease. For that, we have to identify every missing case. Also, the performance of the TB control programme needs to be improved by five times to meet the 2025 deadline,” officials told the state health ministers who attended the meeting.
Identifying nearly 10 lakh missing TB patients is the biggest challenge for the officials tasked to eradicate the disease from India.
Despite making TB a notifiable disease in 2012, the surveillance system has so far managed to find out only 18 lakh TB patients while all scientific estimates indicate that there are nearly 28 lakh TB patients in India.
“More than doctors, we should target compounders with the incentive,” suggested Bihar Health Minister Mangal Pandey to the Union Minister J P Nadda.
Health Ministry sources told DH another major issue is the under-utilisation of the state-of-the-art CB-Nat diagnostic machines that can diagnose regular and drug-resistant TB within hours. Though each of these machines can perform 600-1000 tests every month, in states like Jharkhand only 70 tests were carried out in a month.
“Close to 180 machines are yet to be installed; they haven’t even been unpacked,” sources said. India has nearly 1,100 of these machines and there are plans to install more.
Nadda also asked state ministers to fill up the vacancies in the health department so that more manpower is available at the district and block levels to tackle the dreaded infection. (Deccan Herald)
