Good Morning Dear MMS Reader,
Even as India looks over its shoulder in fear of a possible third wave of Covid, another disease which also targets the lungs is flying under the radar—Tuberculosis, or TB. The numbers associated with TB in India are staggering. Most people already know that India has the highest TB burden in the world—three out of every 10 TB patients globally hail from India.
The actual burden is even higher. India has the most TB cases that go undetected by the government's monitoring system. While the government identified 1.82 million cases last year, at least 500,000 more cases are believed to have slipped through the cracks.
These cases are usually ones that are identified and treated in the private sector, but don't make it to the government's notice. With no proper governmental oversight, these patients are at risk of receiving inadequate treatment or being overcharged for care, which could cause patients to be unable to afford care at all. Both these issues only fuel the spread of the disease further.
To combat this, a group of international health agencies came together. They created and funded a programme to incentivise India's private sector doctors across 15 states to treat TB patients and inform the government of the same. Over three years, these agencies pooled in around $40 million to painstakingly build a network of 15,000 doctors, which has been instrumental in shrinking India's TB blindspot.
This arrangement, though, was not meant to be permanent. As of last year, the Indian government was meant to take over financing of the programme. This transition has been anything but smooth, with bureaucratic red tape threatening to strangle the project.
Payments worth crores of rupees have not reached the agencies implementing the programme. Incentives for doctors have also dried up. At a time when the programme was supposed to be expanded to 350 more districts, it is now at risk of coming undone entirely, focus on www.multimediastudio.net for more details #yusufbhandarkar