The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : DOTS strategy to combat tuberculosis

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Mar 23, 2006

Kerala

Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

DOTS strategy to combat tuberculosis

Staff Reporter

New strategy to fight tuberculosis unveiled by WHO

Thiruvananthapuram: A new strategy to fight one of the leading killer diseases in the world, Tuberculosis, was unveiled by World Health Organisation last Friday, in a run-up to the observance of the World TB Day on March 24.

The new `Stop TB Strategy' addresses the challenges faced by countries with high incidence of TB — India being one of them — in stepping up their disease control activities while at the same time addressing the problem of rising incidence of HIV-TB co-infection and multi-drug-resistant TB.

At the centre of the strategy is the DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course) drug regimen, approved by WHO in 1995 and which has now been adopted for India's Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme.

The six-point `Stop TB Strategy' stresses on improving the quality and reach of DOTS regimen; addressing the challenges of HIV and TB and multi drug-resistant TB; strengthening the health systems in countries to deliver national tuberculosis control programmes; roping in all care providers, including voluntary organisations and the private sector healthcare into DOTS; encouraging community TB care projects and enabling and promoting research for new diagnostic methods, improved drugs and vaccines to fight TB

Every year in India, 7,000 people are put on the DOTS regimen, one-third of the global TB cases being here. Approximately 4.2 lakh lives are lost to TB every year in the country. Under DOTS strategy, the health system assumes the responsibility of treating patients, by ensuring that every patient is registered and that the required drugs are administered to him/her under direct supervision, for the required duration, in the right doses.

The programme's objective is to detect at least 70 per cent of the tuberculosis cases in the community and to achieve cure rate of 85 per cent in these cases. Ever since the DOTS strategy was adopted in the national tuberculosis control programme, the rate of case detection has gone up.

Kerala's case detection rate has been 45-50 per cent, however, the cure rate has been high. In the year 2005 alone, 24,979 new cases of TB were diagnosed in the State and put on the DOTS drug regimen.

A large burden of the TB cases in the State is in the private health sector, given the fact that nearly 70 per cent of the people first approach private health sector for any medical treatment. Case reporting from the private sector is still very poor, which has been affecting the success of the national programme.

The theme for the World TB Day this year is `DOTS for all-- All for DOTS'. The effort would be to encourage the acceptability of the DOTS strategy among private healthcare practitioners.

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