India needs to fight multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, before it gets late
Budget 2019 : Wearing a face mask and weighing just 32 kg, 39-year-old Vaishali Shah appeared more a lanky teenager than an adult when IndiaSpend met her in October 2018, at her one-bedroom apartment in Dombivli , a city in Maharashtra’s Thane district, 40 km away from central Mumbai in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Shah, a tuition teacher and mother of a 14-year-old, is an extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) patient. XDR-TB is an advanced form of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). As the names suggest, MDR-TB patients are resistant to first-line drugs such as rifampicin and isoniazid, which are used to treat the more common drug-sensitive TB. XDR-TB patients are resistant to some second line drugs as well. While TB is not uncommon in congested Mumbai, Shah’s case is unique because she is among the few drug-resistant TB patients in India who has been able to access two new oral drugs--bedaquiline and delamanid--to fight XDR-TB, along with an add-on...