New Delhi, March 26 : In an attempt to assess the mounting threat of tuberculosis, members of the British Parliamentary Group on Global TB are currently in India to get a first hand look at the situation in the country and form a joint parliamentary caucus to fight the dreaded disease.

The five British MPs led by Conservative MP Nick Herbert will meet members of the Indian Parliamentarians Medical Forum to form a body to take the battle forward.

Indian MPs Shakeel Ahemad, Karan Singh Yadav, M. Jagannath, Raman Senthil, and Arvind Sharma will discuss the dramatic progress made by the Indian National TB Control Programme in expanding its DOTS programme and also some of the major challenges that still need to be addressed.

The British MPs have so far visited a number of hospitals and TB control programme centres in Delhi and would meet authorities in Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi.

Every year, India witnesses nearly 1.8 million TB cases. The Revised National TB Control Programme, popularly known as DOTS programme, was introduced in the country in 1997 in a phased manner to achieve a cure rate of 85 percent of new sputum positive cases and to detect at least 70 percent of such cases. The entire country was covered by March 2006.

Till date, 6.7 million patients have received DOTS treatment averting more than 1.22 million deaths. TB is still a major cause of deaths worldwide and 1.6 million people had succumbed to the disease in 2005, World Health Organisation (WHO) had said in Geneva last week(IANS)