US pledges $4.17 mn fighting TB in India

New Delhi: The United States on Tuesday pledged $4.17 million to fight tuberculosis in India.

India has 1.8 million new cases each year and has the highest number of infections in the world, officials said.

Nearly 350,000 Indians die of the infectious disease annually, and most could have been saved if the disease had been detected early and treated, said deputy director-general of federal health services, L S Chauhan.

Early treatment also renders tuberculosis noninfectious and helps to stem its spread, he said.

Tuberculosis usually strikes the lungs, but can attack any part of the body. It generally spreads from person to person, through coughs and sneezes.

To aid Indian efforts to battle TB, US Ambassador David C Mulford and the World Health Organisation representative in India, Salim Habayeb inked a deal on Tuesday under which Washington is to provide $4.17 million (€3.4 million) over the next 12 months to bolster local research efforts and the government's ground-level disease control program.

With South Asia accounting for more than 40 per cent of the world's cases of the disease, ''the United States has invested $40 million in the fight against tuberculosis in India since 1998.''

Tuberculosis often devastates AIDS patients, whose weakened immune systems are overwhelmed by the disease.

''Nearly 50 per cent of AIDS patients died of tuberculosis in India,'' Mulford said.

Despite the 1.8 million new cases each year in India, New Delhi's efforts to control the disease have met with some success in recent years.

Chauhan said that India's disease control program has covered the entire country since March, and that the treatment success rate has more than trebled, from 25 percent in 1998 to 86 per cent in 2004.

The ''death rate has been brought down sevenfold, from 29 per cent in 1998 to 4 per cent (at present),'' the Health Ministry said in a statement.