THANE: Thane city falls under the top 10 cities in the state that provides tuberculosis TB ) care according to a quarterly report of the government’s Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP).Officials from the Thane civic health department said that the rankings are done on the basis of five criteria — number of patients not suffering from the disease, notifying the government about TB patients from both public and private hospitals, conducting HIV tests of patients, providing them the Cartridge-based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT) test and giving them financial benefit.“We have around 4,770 patients in the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) area out of which around 3,622 are drug sensitive patients and 1,148 drug resistant. Our success rate has been around 86 per cent and we are hoping that it will increase as we are lagging behind when it comes to online updates. So far, we have provided around Rs 33 lakh benefits to patients suffering from TB and will be giving out to more patients. Also, we have screened around 74 per cent patients for HIV,” said Dr Khushbu Taori, TB officer, TMC.Officials of the health department added that the report is based on details provided by each city on the government’s online portal Nikshay, which keeps track of TB patients in the country.“We are hoping to increase our ranking as we still have to update more details of the patients and owing to technical errors we were unable to do so. Also, as it becomes difficult to keep a tab on patients who have migrated. We have increased our focus even there so that the percentage of success rate increases,” added Dr Taori.

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