71 dead.
In just six months.
From a disease the world keeps saying is curable.
That's the quiet headline coming out of Mizoram this week — and the numbers behind it tell a much sharper story.
61,246 people were tested for TB between January and June 2026.
1,087 came back positive.
71 of them didn't make it.
And the patient profile is unusually grim.
👨 600 male (around 57%)
🧒 977 above age 14 — TB here is overwhelmingly hitting working-age adults
🫁 520 with lung TB — the contagious kind that spreads through a cough
💊 47 with MDR-TB — multidrug-resistant, the version that laughs at first-line antibiotics
🩸 92 co-infected with HIV — nearly 1 in 12 TB patients
That last number is the one that should stop you.
Mizoram has quietly carried India's highest HIV prevalence rate — around 2.73%, far above the national average.
And HIV + TB is a brutal pairing.
People living with HIV are up to 18 times more likely to develop active TB.
So when a small state already battling an HIV epidemic gets hit by a TB surge…
the math turns deadly, fast.
Here's the part most people miss.
TB isn't just a medical fight. It's a nutrition fight.
Under the Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, patients get monthly food baskets from community donors — Nikshay Mitras — to help them actually survive the year-long treatment.
In Mizoram right now:
🤝 374 patients are receiving food baskets
❤️ 103 donors are stepping up
📉 Only 28% of TB patients have a sponsor
That means 72% are fighting TB on an empty plate.
Despite all of this, 86.49% of patients were cured in the same period.
That's the part the system gets right.
But 71 deaths in six months is a reminder that the last mile of TB elimination isn't about discovering new drugs.
It's about food. Housing. HIV care. Follow-ups. Donors.
The boring stuff.
The stuff that decides who lives.
India wants to eliminate TB by 2025.
Mizoram's six-month report card is a quiet warning that the disease isn't waiting for our deadlines.
It's evolving — into drug-resistant strains, into HIV co-infections, into a story of who has support and who doesn't.
Curing TB is medicine.
Ending it is everything else.
That's all for now!
