World Tuberculosis Day: Narendra Modi, Ram Nath Kovind urge stakeholders to help make India TB-free by 2025

New Delhi: On World Tuberculosis Day, President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday urged all stakeholders to help eliminate the disease by 2025. “On World Tuberculosis Day, I call upon all stakeholders to come together to fight tuberculosis. Tuberculosis continues to be one of the biggest public health challenges in our country. The time has come for all of us to join hands to eliminate tuberculosis from India by 2025,” the president tweeted. “In the spirit of this year’s World Tuberculosis Day theme of ‘Wanted: Leaders for a tuberculosis-free world’, I urge citizens and organisations to take the lead in the movement to end tuberculosis. A tuberculosis-free world is a wonderful service to humanity,” Modi tweeted. [caption id=“attachment_4192641” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PTI[/caption] He also said that the government was working to make India tuberculosis-free. “While the world has set a target of 2030 for tuberculosis elimination, we in India want to become tuberculosis-free by 2025! At the recent Delhi End Tuberculosis Summit, I spoke more about the subject,” he said in another tweet attaching a news report of about his speech on tuberculosis on 13 March. The World Tuberculosis Day is observed to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis and to step up efforts to end the global epidemic. The date marks the day in 1882 when Robert Koch announced that he had discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which opened the way towards diagnosing and curing this disease.