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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | TB rule change for private doctors

TB rule change for private doctors

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published Published on Jan 21, 2012   modified Modified on Jan 21, 2012

-The Telegraph

The Union health ministry plans to initiate a process to make tuberculosis a notifiable disease, compelling all private doctors nationwide to keep local health authorities informed about their TB patients.

A senior health official said the notification would mean private practitioners would have to inform health authorities about patients who show up with symptoms for the first time and patients treated earlier who may have developed drug-resistant TB.

“This is not intended to be a stick — it is in the larger interests of patients, their families, their communities, and the country,” said Ashok Kumar, the deputy director general and head of the revised national TB control programme (RNTCP).

Kumar declined to specify how long the process might take, but said the health ministry has decided to begin the process to make TB notifiable. The move comes amid long-standing concerns about the mismanagement of TB in the private sector.

This infection needs to be treated through specific combinations of multiple drugs for six months, or longer. A wrong combination of drugs or an inappropriate duration of treatment can fuel the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB bacilli.

Two years ago, Zarir Udwadia and other doctors at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai asked 106 private practitioners in the city to write a prescription for a patient with lung TB, and detected 63 different drug regimens — combinations of drugs and duration of treatment. Only six were correct.

The health ministry estimates the RNTCP now captures 72 per cent of all new TB patients in the country each year and claims an 87 per cent success rate among the first-time patients who seek treatment under this programme.

Kumar said the notification was intended to draw more TB patients from the private sector into the RNTCP and support appropriate treatment for patients being treated by their private practitioners. The initial therapy for first-time TB patients involves a regimen of four drugs to be taken for six months.

The Telegraph, 21 January, 2012, http://telegraphindia.com/1120121/jsp/nation/story_15033821.jsp


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