India is the country with the highest burden of TB, with World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics that said 1.5 million people died in 2014 from the disease which ranks alongside HIV as a leading killer worldwide. According to the World Health Organisations Global Tuberculosis Report 2015, released on October 28, of the 9.6 million new TB cases in 2014, 58 per cent were in the South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions.

India(23%), Indonesia(10%) and China(10%) had the largest number of cases respectively of the global total in 2014. Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa also had high numbers of TB cases last year. Nearly 1.5 million people died from the disease last year, including 140,000 children.

Approximately 90 per cent of total TB deaths (among HIV- negative and HIV-positive people) and 80 per cent of TB deaths among HIV-negative people occurred in the African and South-East Asia Regions in 2014. India and Nigeria accounted for about one-third of global TB deaths (both including and excluding those among HIV-positive people), the report added.

Globally, TB prevalence in 2015 was 42 per cent lower than in 1990.

How to tackle??

• Intensified efforts, are needed to ensure that all cases are detected, notified to national surveillance systems, and treated according to international standards.
• It said that in order to reduce TBs overall burden, detection and treatment gaps need to be closed, funding shortfalls filled and new diagnostics, drugs and vaccines developed.
• Effective diagnosis and treatment saved 43 million lives between 2000 and 2015.