PUNE: As many as 2,057 individuals have been identified with active tuberculosis (TB) during the mass community screening campaign conducted in the state’s 36 districts.An intensive door-to-door campaign to detect unreported TB cases across the state was kicked off on November 12 and continued up to November 24. The state health department screened roughly 86 lakh high-risk individuals in both rural and urban areas during the second phase of the campaign. Around 10,000 health workers and community volunteers were engaged in the screening activity.“After identifying 2,057 patients with active TB, we put them on treatment. The proportion of TB cases identified during these campaigns may appear to be on the lower side, but such drives are crucial for early detection and breaking the chain of TB infection transmission,” said Padmaja Jogewar, joint director (TB) at the state health department.High-risk individuals living in urban slums, orphanages as well as street dwellers, construction-site workers, former TB patients, HIV-infected persons, diabetics and the malnourished population were mainly among those who were screened for TB.The active “case finding” campaign began in the state last year with three door-to-door campaigns, which led to the diagnosis of 4,000 “hidden” patients in the community.This is the second such campaign this year. In the first campaign held across the state in January, health officials had detected 1,600 new TB patients.“The drives help in educating people and creating mass awareness about TB in the community,” said Sanjeev Kamble, a senior public health expert and director of the state health department.The fight against TB has intensified in Maharashtra with the involvement of NGOs, who are working closely with private practitioners to find “missing” or “hidden” TB patients and put them on treatment, while ensuring their confidentiality.The project, for which a public-private partnership pact was signed last month, is a part of the Union government’s large-scale drive to identify 15 lakh missing patients across the country in the next three years. It is already operational in 13 municipal corporations in the state, including Pune. However, it will be formally launched in Maharashtra on December 15 this year.The project, Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis (JEET), aims at speeding up the process of finding, treating and tracking every TB patient in the community till s/he is cured. “It is essential to diagnose and treat missing TB cases to achieve the target of eliminating the disease from the country by 2025,” Jogewar said.Undiagnosed and mistreated cases continue to drive the epidemic in India. In 2010, there were around 2.3 million TB cases with 3.6 lakh deaths.Around 1,000 people die of TB every day in India. Nearly one in six deaths among those aged 15-49 is due to TB. Nearly 100,000 cases of serious MDR-TB are estimated to occur in the country annually, and each case costs more than Rs1 lakh to be diagnosed and treated.

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