Precision Public Health is Key to Closing the Global TB Care Seeking Gap

Tuberculosis (TB) killed 1.4 million people in 2019. India accounts for more than a quarter of the 10 million people who get sick with TB around the world each year. While there have been improvements in the quality of and access to TB treatment, significant gaps remain in care seeking, with 42 percent of Indians with TB not getting diagnosed on time.

Getting people to go to the doctor as soon as they have symptoms is a big part of the problem we need to solve. This requires a deeper understanding of what drives someone’s choices to seek care (or not) and their journey, a critical first step in developing a precision public health strategy.

To deploy such a strategy in a country with a high burden of TB, Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) partnered with Surgo Foundation and the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC). From 2018 to 2019 we investigated why people in the southern Indian city of Chennai did or did not seek prompt care for TB symptoms. Our motivation for identifying barriers to care was simple: to develop innovative, precise interventions to address them.