New Delhi: In what is termed a major success in the country's health sector, India has become the first country in the world to unveil its own “in-country dynamic mathematical model” for estimating tuberculosis spread. With this, TB incidence estimation information for India will be made available by March every year, top sources in the Health Ministry said on Tuesday.
This model is constructed based on the natural history of the disease, individual status of infection, health care seeking, missed or correct diagnosis, treatment coverage and outcomes including cure and death. This helps in getting TB estimates six months earlier than that of WHO which gives estimates in October every year.
“With this mathematical model, India can also make such estimates at the State level in future,” the sources said. India’s TB incidence rate stands at 196 per 100,000 population instead of the 210 estimated by WHO and the estimated deaths from the communicable disease stand at 3.20 lakh instead of the 4.94 lakh that was projected in 2021.
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The absolute incidence numbers for 2022 arrived using India's own model, standing at 27.70 lakh in 2022 against the 29.50 lakh estimated by WHO in 2021. The TB mortality rate, according to the Indian model, stands at 23 per 1,00,000 people against the 35 that WHO had estimated in 2022. The pandemic disruption has been estimated at about 4 lakh missed TB cases for each of the two years, 2020 and 2021.
“We are the only country in the world to do so and when we shared those numbers recently during the Stop TB summit in Varanasi, the world accepted those numbers,” the top government source said. The findings from the domestic modelling effort were shared with 198 delegates from 40 countries who attended the Varanasi meeting presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The TB model was drawn up by using data from several sources including the Nikshay portal of private sector drug sales, and the sub-national certification system where the TB-free status of various states is estimated and ranked. “The National TB Prevalence survey in 2020-21, also helps to identify and measure the diversity of TB burden in the country with state-level estimates,” sources said.
