UP govt screens 27 lakh citizens in special campaign to eradicate TB by 2025
The Uttar Pradesh government has screened more than 27 lakh citizens as part of a comprehensive campaign to eliminate tuberculosis (TB) from Uttar Pradesh by 2025.
The state health department withdrew one of its two official portals janma-mrityutathya.wb.gov.in and mccd.wbhealth.gov.in (medical certification of cause of death-MCCD) owing to massive differences between two separate death figures mentioned in the two portals.
The department found differences after studying the two portal figures which showed differences in total number of deaths uploaded in the two portals during the past three years, across the state.
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The number of deaths mentioned in the mccd.wbhealth.gov.in is abnormally very low.
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The cause of death should be mandatorily mentioned in the mccd.wbhealth.gov.in, where the number of deaths is 1,35,395 in 2023 while the figure mentioned in the janma-mrityutathya.wb.gov.in is 6,62,991 in the same period.
Cause of death is not mandatory for the portal janma-mrityutathya.wb.gov.in.
Health department officials have flagged the abnormal differences in figures (five lakh plus) between the two government portals.
Swasthya Bhaban has decided to probe the differences.
Medical experts in the city felt that the differences in number of deaths mentioned in the two official portals will have a bad impact on public health issues.
“It would be difficult to determine the prevalence rate of a disease if causes of deaths are not religiously uploaded in the government’s official portals. How can the doctors and officials dealing in public health issues alert the administration about high prevalence of a disease if causes of deaths remain unknown,” they said.
“Every death in the state should be officially registered in government records like these portals. I don’t know whether the rural bodies like panchayats and urban local bodies in district towns regularly send death figures to Swasthya Bhaban,” one medical expert associated with a state-run medical college hospital in the city said, requesting anonymity.
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