Context

According to Global Tuberculosis Report 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with impacts on care-seeking behaviour, threatens to reverse the recent progress in reducing the global burden of tuberculosis (TB) disease.

Key Highlights of the Report

• The evidence from several high TB burden countries of large reductions in the monthly number of people with TB being detected and officially reported in 2020 is available.
• India accounts for 26% of TB cases in the world and the TB notifications during the period January-June 2020 in India fell by 25% compared to the same period in 2019.
• The TB notifications in India in February 2020 increased compared with January but then reduced sharply in April to reach less than 40% of the January figure before increasing to reach about 75% of January figure in the month of June.
• The dip in TB notifications has not been very sharp in India and the recovery after the dip has been more in India than Indonesia, Philippines and South Africa.
• In India, notifications of people newly diagnosed with TB increased 74% from 1.2 million to 2.2 million between 2013 and 2019.
• In the case of India, there is a gap in the number of people newly diagnosed and reported due to a combination of underreporting of people diagnosed with TB and under-diagnosis.

Global Tuberculosis Report

• The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a global TB report every year since 1997.
• The purpose of the report is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the status of the TB epidemic.
• The report is based primarily on data gathered by World Health Organization (WHO) in annual rounds of data collection.

Source: The Hindu