While private doctors are reluctant to notify cases of tuberculosis (TB), laxity on part of chemists in monitoring the sale of anti-TB drugs that are covered under Schedule H1 of Drugs and Cosmetics Act has also hit the State’s fight against the infectious disease.
Although rules mandate that chemists should maintain a register with details of patients, doctors, name of the drug, and quantity supplied for all the 46 Schedule H1 drugs and share the details of anti-TB drugs sold with the district drug controllers, most of them are not following this, said State Health Department officials.
The ongoing second phase of active case finding (ACF) campaign to detect TB in high-priority and vulnerable areas of 11 districts has highlighted this fact.
These factors, coupled with several cases going undiagnosed following the stigma attached to the disease, has resulted in Karnataka struggling to detect 101 cases in a population of 1,00,000 a year. The Union Health Ministry’s revised estimates put the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) in India at 217 cases per 1,00,000 population in 2015.
TB is a notifiable disease in the country since May 2012, for which the government has set up a Web-based, case-based notification network called NIKSHAY. Despite awareness regarding mandatory TB notification, a significant number of private practitioners in the State do not report the cases. Sources in the Health Department said this had led to cases being missed out of government data.
Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare, Shalini Rajneesh said she had directed the State drugs controller to intimate all chemists to regularly submit reports reports to the district TB officers on the sale of anti-TB drugs.
State drugs controller B.T. Khanapure said he would ensure that the rule is strictly followed. “We have already started monitoring the sale and are taking action, including suspension or cancellation of the licence of medical shops that are found to have violated the rules,” he said.
Meanwhile, as on Friday, 1,227 new positive TB cases have been detected during the ACF campaign. The campaign that began on July 17 in Bagalkot, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike area, Bengaluru Rural, Bengaluru Urban, Belagavi, Ballari, Koppal, Raichur, Kalaburagi, Ramanagaram, and Vijayapura will go on till July 31.
According to officials, among the tested in high-risk population the positivity should have been 5% as per estimates. “But in Karnataka, the positivity detected is around 2.8%. This could be either because Karnataka has a robust monitoring mechanism or cases are taking treatment in private or are going undiagnosed,” said a senior official.
According to data provided by the Health Department, the highest number of cases have been detected in Belagavi (283) and the least in Ramanagaram (20). While 76 new positive cases have been detected in Bengaluru City, a considerable number of cases were diagnosed in Ballari (208) and Koppal (198). Nearly 7% of the total number are children, the official added.