In a major achievement for Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh has for the first time set a record of all its districts scoring over 80 out of the designated 100 points in the key indicators of the National Tuberculosis Elimination Program in 2023.

The milestone demonstrates the government’s commitment to fulfilling the Prime Minister’s resolution to make the country TB-free by 2025.

Among the districts, Rampur has topped with 92.8 points, followed by Pratapgarh with 91.6 and Bijnor with 90.9. The overall score for the state was 85.3 points, which is 5.3 points higher than the set benchmark. This score is based on the annual achievements until December

According to Health Director General Dr Brijesh Rathore, monitoring and periodic reviews by the Yogi government have resulted in the state achieving a milestone under the National Tuberculosis Elimination Program. According to the programme, if a district scores more than 80 out of the designated 100 points, its performance will be considered excellent. In accordance with this, the performance of all districts of UP was better in 2023 compared to the previous years.

He mentioned that the programme assigns 20 points for the key indicator of TB patient notifications, wherein the state has received the full score. This indicates that throughout the year, special focus was laid on identification of TB patients in every district, because the sooner the patients are identified, sooner treatment can be started and they can be cured and regain health.

He further informed that the Central TB Division set a target of 5.50 lakh TB patient notifications for Uttar Pradesh in 2023, against which the state notified over 6.27 lakh (114 per cent) TB patients, far exceeding the target. The second key indicator was the success rate of treatment of drug sensitive TB patients at 89 per cent. The rate of quality treatment of drug resistant TB (DRTB) patients was 88 per cent.

National Program Director, Dr Seema Srivastava said that the HIV testing rate along with TB was 96 per cent in 2023. The Health Department aims to ensure HIV testing for every TB patient. The state has shown better performance in TB testing cases through Universal Drug Susceptibility Testing (UDST), also known as CBNAAT or TrueNAT machines, achieving an 86 per cent success rate. Efforts are being made to further improve this performance with the assured availability of machines at the block level.

Under the Nikshay Poshan Yojana, the state received 7.1 points out of the allocated 10 points to ensure a monthly payment of Rs 500 during the treatment of TB patients. This is because some patients do not want to come under this scheme.

In the case of Tuberculosis Preventive Treatment (TPT), most districts made commendable efforts. In this regard, the state scored 4.5 points out of the specified five points for bringing children under the age of five into the TPT ambit. For PLHIV’s TPT, the state received 4.4 points out of the allocated five points.

Joint Director (Terosis)/State Tuberculosis Control Program Officer Dr Shailendra Bhatnagar said here on Tuesday that Moradabad division stood first in the state by scoring 89.5 points out of 100 points in the indicators of the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme.

In comparison, other divisions achieved the following scores, Prayagraj – 89.1, Aligarh – 88.6, Bareilly – 87, Chitrakoot – 87.5, Saharanpur – 87.5, Varanasi – 87.7, Gorakhpur – 87.9, Azamgarh – 87, Meerut – 86.7, Ayodhya – 86.8, Jhansi – 86.8, Deoria – 85.4, Mirzapur – 85.4, Lucknow – 84.7, Agra – 85.5, Basti – 84.2, and Kanpur division – 84.2 points.