Hundreds of students took part in the formation of a human chain and rally at AIIMS to express solidarity with TB patients and raise public awareness about the debilitating disease on the occasion of World TB day today.
The rally, flagged off by AIIMS Director Dr M C Misra, saw teachers and students from Dayal Singh College (DU) and NDMC schools holding banners and posters in their hands informing locals about the seriousness of TB.
Participants also urged people to be mindful about spitting habits and seeking diagnosis if cough persists for more than two weeks.
"Tuberculosis has inflicted much misery in terms of suffering and morbidity in the past but wherever we have taken strong and proven measures, the number of people falling ill with the dreaded disease has declined remarkably.
"Government of India should generate its own data reading efficacy of various diagnostic tests, as some of the recently introduced molecular methods have shown poor performance in detecting the drug resistance" said Prof Sarman Singh, faculty-in-charge of Microbiology from Department of Laboratory Medicine, AIIMS.
"GeneXpert has been a revolutionary diagnostic method in Africa but in India it can miss as many as 1/3 of Rifampicin resistance cases. If such systems are used routinely, this would give a false impression that India has very low rifampicin resistance thus making the programme managers complacent,"
As per WHO, India and China contribute nearly 50 per cent to the global burden of Multiple Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB).
