[Boston Medical Center] Providing Food Baskets to People with TB Is Cost-Effective and Could Avert Over 100,000 Deaths Annually in India

4 May 2026

Boston Medical Center news release

Undernutrition is the single greatest modifiable risk factor for TB, contributing to immune suppression, treatment failure, and death. Despite this, nutritional support has not traditionally been a part of standard TB treatment. Researchers from Boston Medical Center and Boston University, in close collaboration with India’s National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme, found that providing food baskets to people with TB and their households may not only be cost-effective, but may also save tens of thousands of lives annually in India if implemented at scale. The findings were published in BMJ Global Health.

The researchers found that for every 10,000 patients, food supplementation was estimated to prevent 10,470 years of poor health or early death. It would cost an estimated $141 to achieve each of these health gains, which is well below India’s benchmark of $550 and suggests that the intervention could be a good investment. In fact, in 94% of the study’s simulations, food support was found to be a cost-effective way to improve health outcomes for people with TB. When scaled to India’s 2.8 million annual TB cases, universal coverage could avert approximately 120,000 TB deaths per year nationwide.

Read the full news release here.

Source: Boston Medical Center