Dr Anurag Bhargava

Dr Anurag Bhargava is physician and epidemiologist is currently a Professor in the Department of Medicine, at Yenepoya Medical College in Mangalore, Karnataka, India, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University. He is an advisory group member of the following technical groups: the SAGE –IVD (WHO Geneva); STAG-TB (WHO SEAR), the Indo-US RePORT-India consortium, and the National Technical Working Group on TB and Comorbidities of the National TB Elimination Programme.

He has three decades of experience in delivery of healthcare at all levels of care in India, including a decade spent as one of the founders of a large community health programme and rural hospital in rural central India. His research interests are in the field of tuberculosis, nutrition, acute febrile illnesses, and non-communicable diseases. He has led the development of 2 national guidelines and co-authored a third. He has led research which established undernutrition in adults in India as the major driver of the TB epidemic in India and undernutrition as a major reversible risk factor for mortality in patients with TB. His epidemiologic analysis of the historic Papworth socio-medical experiment in TB control (1918-43) showed that TB incidence in a high-risk group could be reduced by more than 80% with social interventions including adequate nutrition. He is currently leading the largest field-based cluster randomised trial of nutritional support in TB affected households (the RATIONS study in eastern India) which aims at reducing TB incidence in household contacts and improving outcomes in patients. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anurag-bhargava-095a705b/