Message from Line Director

Message from Line Director

The Government of Bangladesh (GoB) is committed to providing TB diagnosis and treatment services completely free of cost to all citizens of the country. It strives to make services equally available to all people of Bangladesh irrespective of age, sex, religion, ethnicity, social status or race.

Under the Mycobacterial Disease Control (MBDC) Unit of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), the National Tuberculosis Control Program (NTP) is working with a mission of eliminating TB from Bangladesh.

NTP policies and strategies to date have been informed by international standards formulated by World Health Organization (WHO), such as the directly observed treatment, short course (DOTS) strategy launched in 1993, and the Stop TB Strategy that underpinned the Global Plan to Stop TB 2006–2015. New multisectoral strategic approaches and new international targets for the post-2015 period have been approved by the Sixty-seventh World Health Assembly in May 2014, resulted in the formulation of WHO’s End TB Strategy in 2015. Under this strategy, new, ambitious yet feasible global targets are proposed for 2035. These include achieving a 95% decline in deaths due to tuberculosis compared with 2015, and reaching an equivalent of 90% reduction in tuberculosis incidence rate from a projected 225 cases/100,000 in 2015 to 10 cases/100,000 or less by 2035.

At central level, NTP is responsible for policy, planning, management, coordination, training, supply, supervision, monitoring and implementation of TB services.

NTP collaborates with approximately fifty national and international health and development agencies to implement the End TB Strategy.

Recent major achievements of NTP include:

  • All oral Drug Resistance TB regimen being scaled up countrywide in 2021.
  • 100% Case based TB patients reporting mechanism established .
  • The NTP has achieved and is sustaining a very high TB treatment success rates for all forms of TB especially in new and relapse TB cases
  • The GoB came through with its commitment to procure first line anti-TB medicines in 2018 effectively shifting this responsibility from the Global Fund to self.
  • Country wide scale up of new diagnostic algorithm.
  • Rapid expansion of GeneXpert – 478 sites with 590 machines. and Truenat – 38 Machine
  • Dissemination of National TB prevalence Survey 2015-2016 Report.
  • Completed 2nd DRS Survey.
  • The GoB committed at the TB -UNHLM to adopt high-level mechanisms for coordination and review to accelerate progress towards ending TB.

Finally, we would like to thank Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for its continued guidance and leadership in NTP’s effort to end TB from Bangladesh by 2035. Moreover, DGHS has always been supportive in extending its technical direction. We are thankful to the  The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria;  and other stakeholders for supporting National TB Control Program,Bangladesh.