Punjab government has issued the instructions to the private hospitals and all medical colleges to notify the patients suffering from TB to the health department to ensure the real time monitoring of the patient data.

Stating this on 27 February, the Health and Family Welfare Minister Brahm Mohindra said that instructions have been already issued to the civil surgeons to take action against institutes not complying with orders of the central government in this regard. He directed the State Drug Controller to ensure that chemists should maintain the record of schedule H1 drugs including anti TB drugs besides bringing the number of TB patients they were dealing with, in the notice of the district TB officers.

He said that this is matter of serious concern that around two million of people are suffering from TB in India those can easily infected the high risk groups of old aged people, children, diabetic and HIV patients. “As per record of health department as many as 39218 patients were registered in public sectors and 6704 patients were registered in private sectors during 2017,” he added.

The Minister further said that the state government has been all set to install 7 CB-NAAT machines to diagnose suspected and drug-resistant patients suffering from TB in four districts in addition to one CB-NAAT machine already installed in 22 districts which having excessive migrate population to control tuberculosis in high risk areas of the state.

Highlighting the importance of CB-NAAT machines, Mr Mohindra said that it has been medically recorded that in some cases microscopic test failed to diagnose TB in affected patients where CB-NAAT machines being high-tech, are most trustworthy alternate of early diagnostic mechanism, thus, help in methodical treatment of patients.

“After observing the success rate of CB-NAAT machines, now state government has decided to install additional 7 CB-NAAT machines at high risk areas in district Ludhiana, Patiala, Jalandhar and Amritsar which are having the high number of migratory population”, he added.

He said that due to strong constant efforts of programme managers at state and district level the state has been able to improve its performance compared to 2016 with the success rate of 88 per cent. He said that considering the circumstances, it’s our moral duty, if anyone having cough for two or more weeks then one has to get oneself tested from the DoT centres for the early diagnose and treatment which is provided free of cost in all government hospitals.