Nearly 60,000 TB cases recorded in Mumbai in 2021; marginal decline from pre-Covid days

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Nearly 60,000 cases of tuberculosis (TB) were reported in Mumbai in 2021, compared to over 43,000 people diagnosed with the disease in the city in 2020, an official from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said on Friday.

As per the data shared by the civic body, though the number of TB cases had risen to 59,052 in 2021 from 43,246 in 2020, the figure is slightly less when compared to 60440 cases reported in 2019 before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Of the total TB patients, 3 per cent are drug sensitive and 14 per cent drug resistant in Mumbai. Annually, around 4,000 to 5,000 drug-resistant patients are found in Mumbai, which is 58 per cent of the total TB patients found in Maharashtra, the civic data stated.

Officials of the BMC's public health department have claimed that all the services and facilities for TB patients were functional during the Covid-19 lockdown as well.
Public health department staffers have in touch with patients through WhatsApp groups and video calls persuading them to continue their treatment and ensured that their supply of medicines remained unaffected during the pandemic, the BMC said.

The department has appointed "TB Champions" for counselling patients as "peer educators" in a few municipal wards of Mumbai. They have decided to have one TB champion in each ward as a pilot project with the help of Tata Institute of Social Science and Tata Funding. These champions will motivate the TB patients to complete their medicine course, it was stated.

"TB survivors who have good communication skills and are willing to work with the BMC are eligible to become TB champions. Most of these TB champions have faced stigma and harsh side-effects of the antibiotics such as hair loss, depression, muscular weakness etc," said Dr Pranita Tipre, TB officer of Mumbai.

Dr Tipre further said that patients who have recovered from the disease have been asked to become TB champions to guide those who have skipped their treatment, and to remove the social stigma attached to the disease.

In a year, the civic body had managed to retrieve 200 patients, who had stopped their treatment, she added.

The Central government has targeted to eradicate the disease from the country by 2025, five years ahead of a global deadline of 2030. In 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched a TB-free India campaign to conduct activities under the national strategic plan for TB Elimination.

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