Era of TB elimination: Growing need to understand diversities of Mycobacterium tuberculosis lineages!

Introduction: The mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) has highly clonal population structure which made the organism spread globally mirroring human migration out of Africa and resulted in the formation of seven lineages. We conducted this study to determine the proportion of spoligotype lineages and drug susceptibility profile of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates among smear positive TB patients attending a tertiary care hospital in Mysore, Karnataka, India.

Methods: It is a descriptive study conducted at JSS Hospital a tertiary care centre at Mysore, India during 2018-19.

Chasing END TB 2025: Arithmetic needed for logistics!

India adopted changes in NTEP (Erstwhile RNTCP, Revised National TB Program, renamed as National TB Elimination Program) in the recent years with an aim to End TB by 2025 way ahead of the global target of ending TB by 2030. It is taking a long time for the changes to trickle down to the grass root level to change the behavior of the ground level force to understand and adopt to the changes that are being ordered and several other changes that are being pushed to the field in tandem. This has made field workers to be on their toes to understand and implement all the changes.

Training strategies practiced for TB elimination.

Training is the backbone of any public health program and it is true for a vast program like TB. It is urgent when the program is aiming to End TB. The strategy that is followed in India for capacity building of TB workers is presented in this article.

Does provision of cash incentive to HIV-infected tuberculosis patients improve the treatment success in programme settings? A cohort study from South India.

Background: In April 2018, the Government of India launched '' (NPY), a cash assistance scheme (500 Indian rupees [~8 USD] per month) intended to provide nutritional support and improve treatment outcomes among tuberculosis (TB) patients.

Objective: To compare the treatment outcomes of HIV-infected TB patients initiated on first-line anti-TB treatment in five selected districts of Karnataka, India before (April-September 2017) and after (April-September 2018) implementation of NPY.

Methods: This was a cohort study using secondary data routinely collected by the national TB and HIV programmes.

Non-response to first-line anti-tuberculosis treatment in Sikkim, India: a risk-factor analysis study.

Sikkim, India, has the highest proportion of tuberculosis (TB) patients on first-line anti-tuberculosis regimens with the outcome 'failure' or 'shifted to regimen for multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB)'. To assess the factors associated with non-response to treatment, i.e.