GENEVA: Reporting of tuberculosis cases in India went down by 41% between 2019 and 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the WHO’s 2021 global TB report released on Thursday. India, followed by Indonesia (14%), the Philippines (12%) and China (8%) were the top four countries that contributed most to the global reduction in TB notifications between 2019 and 2020.
About 16 countries, including these four, together accounted for 93% of the total global drop in notifications.
In its yearly report on TB, the UN health agency said 1.5 million people worldwide died of the bacterial disease last year, a slight rise from the 1.4 million deaths in 2019. The increase in TB deaths, the first in more than a decade, occurred mainly in the 30 countries with the highest burden of TB, including India. The report said the number of people newly diagnosed with TB and those reported to national governments fell to 5.8 million in 2020 from 7.1 million in 2019. WHO estimates that some 4.1 million people currently suffer from TB but have not been diagnosed with the disease or have not officially reported to national authorities. This figure is up from 2.9 million in 2019.
The report showed that the Covid-19 pandemic reversed years of global progress in tackling TB. There was a reduction in provision of TB preventive treatment: Some 2.8 million people accessed this in 2020, a 21% reduction since 2019. Moreover, 2020 also saw a drop in global investment for TB diagnostic, treatment and prevention services.
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