The health department of the Mira Bhayandar Municipal Corporation (MBMC) has warned of penal action against private healthcare establishment’s including hospitals, pathology labs, radiology units, nursing homes, diagnostic services, clinics and even medicine dispensing outlets who treat Tuberculosis (TB) patients or sell anti-TB drugs but fail to notify the same with the public health authority of the municipal corporation. A notification to this effect was released by deputy municipal commissioner Sambhaji Waghmare on Monday.
Not taking appropriate public health action on receiving the TB patient notification will not only attract the provisions of the Indian Penal Code, but also invite penal action for defying the prevention of contagious and communicable disease rules.
As per the national strategic plan, the government aims to eradicate Tuberculosis (TB) by 2025. However this move comes after the authorities noticed private hospitals failed to provide adequate information on TB patients undergoing treatment at their establishment. It has come to light that a large number of TB patients are treated in private hospitals and are going unreported. Notably, TB was made a notifiable disease in 2012.
MBMC’s health department had detected a total of 224 patients suffering from TB, in a fresh survey which was conducted in two phases from 1 to 31 December, 2020. The patients included those detected by volunteers under the Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis (JEET) project which aims at speeding up the process of finding, treating and tracking every TB patient in the community till each one is cured so as to achieve the target of eliminating the disease from the country.
1830 drug-resistant tuberculosis (DRTB) and 177 drug-sensitive tuberculosis (DSTB) patients were under medication last year out of which several have been cured after timely treatment, officials said.
