India recorded highest TB cases in 2014: WHO

United Nations, October 29

India recorded the largest number of tuberculosis cases in the world last year, according to a report by the WHO that said 1.5 million people died in 2014 from the disease which ranks alongside HIV as a leading killer worldwide.

World Health Organisation’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2015, released yesterday, said that of the 9.6 million new TB cases in 2014, 58 per cent were in the South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions. “Most of these deaths could have been prevented. The disease ranks alongside HIV as a leading killer worldwide,” it said.

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. The report noted that globally, TB prevalence in 2015 was 42 per cent lower than in 1990.

The target of halving the rate compared with 1990 was achieved in three WHO regions — the Region of the Americas, the South-East Asia Region and the Western Pacific Region — and in high-burden Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, Uganda and Vietnam. In 2014, there was a marked increase in global TB notifications for the first time since 2007. The annual total of new TB cases, which had been about 5.7 million until 2013, rose to slightly more than 6 million in 2014, mostly due to a 29 per cent increase in notifications in India, which followed the introduction of a policy of mandatory notification in May 2012, creation of a national web-based reporting system in June 2012 and intensified efforts to engage the private health sector. — PTI