Health

Government rolls out door-to-door TB screening


Under the initiative, over the next two to three weeks, health workers will visit vulnerable people potentially infected and check for typical symptoms of TB, such as cough. Persistent, chest pain, weight loss, and fatigue.

Those found to be symptomatic will be tested using TrueNAT, a portable, battery-powered, Internet of Thing RT-PCR platform developed and manufactured by Goa-based Molbio Diagnostics.

Globally, TB is known to be the single largest cause of death from an infectious disease, and India contributes more than 30% of the global TB burden.

In March last year, an analysis by the Ministry of Health announced that Covid had reduced TB detections in India by 25% by 2020. TB notifications dropped to 18.02 lakh in 2020 from 24 .04 lakh in 2019 due to lockdown and resource diversion, the Ministry of Health has said.

Similarly, the global TB report for 2021 released by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that India accounts for 41% of the global TB case reporting rate during the pandemic.

“The impact of Covid is very significant on TB, because from March 2020 for at least about 8 to 9 months TB testing did not take place at all, whether in public or private centres. “Sriram Natarajan, CEO, Founder & Director, Molbio Diagnostics, told IANS.

“In the last year and a half, there have been hardly many TB tests. From about 12%, the positive rate for cases has increased to 35-40%. We have gone back at least about 5 times to seven years. ,” he added.

Even after the gap presented by Covid, Natrajan is optimistic that India can eradicate TB by 2025.

“We still have three years left to rapidly scale up our operations. It can certainly reduce the burden significantly. That’s why the government is taking the initiative during the war to scale up testing in water,” he said.

The domestically developed Truenat technology has also been endorsed by the World Health Organization in 2020 as the world’s first point-of-care rapid molecular diagnostic platform for the diagnosis of tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant diseases.

Truenat is completely independent of the lab and is an affordable machine. In addition to tuberculosis, it can test for nearly 30 diseases, including Covid-19, Hepatitis, HIV, Dengue, Malaria, and will have results in less than an hour.

Truenat machines also have telemedicine capabilities and can be linked to the Cloud and reporting can be done on a real-time basis, Natarajan said.

Truenat machines are being deployed at the county/district level in remote areas across the country. More than 3,500 community and home health care facilities as well as primary care centers have been equipped with the Truenat device in the National Tuberculosis Elimination Program (NTEP) for first-line TB testing. in suspected patients.

The continued expansion in the deployment of this technology across the entire healthcare chain will ensure that patients will not have to travel long distances and wait hours for an early and accurate diagnosis.

Meanwhile, Natarajan said that the next phase of the campaign, which includes an end-to-end case search, will be carried out via mobile vans.

Mobile trucks will be deployed in hotspot areas with X-Ray and PCR systems in them and inspections will be done using X-Ray machines instead of questioning.

He told IANS: “X-ray is a fairly sensitive tool in identifying TB and can also give false-positive results. .

“This is not part of the campaign right now, but will eventually be featured in the campaign. We have 10 mobile trucks in Andhra Pradesh and 5 trucks in Gujarat. We are engaged in a campaign. a larger type of capacity building to make sure we have enough, and he added.

Besides India, the campaign will also be carried out by USAID in 13 other countries through a program called the New Instruments project, which will be expanded to more than 25 countries over the next year, Natarajan told IANS.

Source: IANS



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