New Delhi: Providing food baskets to 2.8 million people with tuberculosis in India could avert over 120,000 deaths yearly, according to a study.
“For less than the cost of many biomedical interventions, we could prevent over 100,000 TB (tuberculosis) deaths a year,” senior author Pranay Sinha, assistant professor of medicine at the US’ Boston University’s school of medicine and an infectious disease physician at the Boston Medical Center, said.
Researchers in collaboration with India’s National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme (NTEP) found that food support is a cost-effective way to improve health outcomes for people with TB in 94 per cent of the study’s simulations. The findings are published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Global Health.
Undernutrition could be the single greatest modifiable risk factor for TB, contributing to immune suppression, treatment failure, and death, the researchers said.
“Undernutrition isn’t just a complication of TB — it’s one of its root causes. While we wait for effective vaccines for TB, food is the vaccine we already have, and providing food baskets to households affected by TB could be one of the most impactful things we do for TB elimination,” Urvashi Singh, former Deputy Director General of the NTEP, said.
In 2020, the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP) was renamed as NTEP, aimed at eliminating the bacterial infectious disease in India.
The study compared standard care with a household-level nutritional food-basket intervention. The researchers also looked at previously published studies, including systematic reviews.
“Nutritional support was projected to avert 10, 470 DALYs (years of poor health) per 10,000 PWTB (persons with TB). When scaled to India’s 2.8 million annual TB cases, this corresponds to approximately 120,120 TB deaths averted nationwide under full coverage,” the authors wrote.
Each of the health gains would cost an estimated USD 141, which the researchers said is well below India’s benchmark of USD 550 and suggests that the intervention could be a good investment.
“What this study shows is that scaling up in-kind nutritional support in India isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s also an excellent investment,” Sinha said.
First author Julia Gallini, a doctoral candidate in biostatistics at Boston University, said, “This work bridges the gap between clinical evidence and policy. We wanted to give NTEP and global health policymakers a clear, quantitative picture of what nutritional support could achieve nationally. The numbers make a compelling case.”
An August 2023 study, published in The Lancet journal, showed that nutritional support with proteins and multivitamins reduced new TB cases by nearly half among family members of patients in India. The RATIONS trial enrolled household contacts of 2,800 patients with confirmed tuberculosis across 28 TB units of the NTEP in four districts of JharKhand.
