While the Indian government had set an ambitious target of making India tuberculosis (TB)-free by 2025, a new study says the ground realities are still looking bleak. Researchers estimated that from 2021 to 2040, India will see more than 62.4 million TB cases across the country and at least 8.1 million deaths caused by TB bacilli. The economic impact could also be severe. The study says India could suffer a cumulative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) loss of over $146 billion US dollars.
“In spite of decade-long pursuits of strategies to end TB, the health and economic disease burdens of TB remain very high in India. Low-income households will bear larger health and relative economic burdens while larger absolute economic burdens will fall on high-income households,” the researchers highlighted in their study that was published in PLoS Medicine.
“United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals call for a 90% reduction in TB deaths by 2030, compared with 2015 but meeting this target is unlikely. Despite considerable increases since 2000, funding for TB is still far short of global financing targets, and substantial investment in research and development funding is needed for new tools to prevent TB disease among the approximately 1.7 billion people infected,” the researchers explained. “To achieve these targets, substantial additional investment in improvements in case detection; and improvements in treatment which are effective in both drug-susceptible and drug-resistant TB are needed.”
The study further highlighted that the most effective strategy for preventing a higher prevalence of TB is to detect new cases. In fact, improved detection/diagnosis could be more potent and yield better benefits than developing new TB drugs.
According to the Stop TB Partnership, a non-profit based in Switzerland, less than half of the funding of $2 billion per year, or $0.9 billion was invested globally for developing new TB diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines in 2020.
“Since India is responsible for 28% of the global TB burden, their estimated share of needed investments, over 2021 to 2040, is likely to be below the estimated benefits from the implementation of either of our improved treatment interventions and dwarfed by the potential gains from achieving the 90% detection rate target,” the researchers noted.
“If the new National TB Elimination Programme in India’s (NTEPI) treatment regimen and expansion of TB detection rates can be developed and rolled-out, in combination, for a cost of U$123-124bn, we show that it would be approximately cost neutral and would additionally remove the suffering and loss caused by more than 7 million fatalities and more than 48 million cases of TB,” they concluded.
