Health programmes must collaboratively address TB–diabetes

With growing strong evidence on the dangerous communion between tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes in India, government health programmes must no longer delay implementing TB-diabetes collaborative activities. “Like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the diabetes epidemic threatens to cause an escalation in TB incidence. China and India constitute 40% of the world’s diabetes population of 400 million people which is likely to go up to half a billion by 2020. If we do not seriously think about the link between TB diabetes my feeling is that it may begin to derail some of the good advances made in India and China on TB control” said Professor (Dr) Anthony D Harries, Senior Advisor, International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union).

"In 2011 India had 6.13 crore people living with diabetes with 983,000 deaths attributable to the disease. India also accounts for 21% of the global incidence of tuberculosis (TB) with 19.8 lakh people developing TB and nearly 300,000 dying of it every year" said Shobha Shukla, Director, CNS Diabetes Media Initiative (DMI) and former senior faculty, Loreto Convent College.