Tuberculosis Research

I am deeply disappointed on reading the editorial “High Time to End Tuberculosis” (EPW, 6 October 2018) on tuberculosis as a public health problem in India. EPW has ended up subscribing to the current thinking on the subject promoted by certain international and national interests, which have inflicted much damage upon the ideas that formed the basis of India’s original National Tuberculosis Control Programme (NTCP).

The editorial unwittingly uses such terms as “eradicating/ending tuberculosis by 2030;” uses what it itself calls under-reporting, while estimating the global burden of tuberculosis and its distribution in different countries; raises an outcry over latent tuberculosis infection, which remains innocuous throughout life in over 95% of the cases; and invokes the poorly substantiated World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Report 2018 with respect to uncorroborated “risk factors,” particularly undernutrition, despite contrary findings of the Tuberculosis Chemotherapy Centre (TCC), Madras, way back in 1961.