Advocacy by patients led authorities to reject a patent application for bedaquiline, a drug that shortens treatment and has a higher success rate.

On the sidelines of the 50th Union World Conference on Lung Health, Dr Furin speaks to The Indian Express how deep TB runs in India and why the target of eliminating it by 2025 is impossible to achieve.

The International Conference on Harmonization considers older people a “special population as they differ from younger adults in terms of comorbidity, polypharmacy, pharmacokinetics and greater vulnerability to adverse drug reactions”.

On Bed Number 348 of the Group of TB (GTB) Hospital in Sewri in central Mumbai, by the third week of August, a malnourished Sneha Gond, 22, could not move without help. Previously, she had been ready for discharge after three months in hospital, but there was nobody to take her home. Though she has an uncle, a younger brother and a sister in Chembur, for four years now, her home had been Niramay Niketan in Trombay, a shelter home for HIV-positive and tuberculosis patients.

A 19-year-old tuberculosis (TB) patient who was among the first in India to receive both Bedaquiline and Delamanid drugs died last month after battling the infection for a prolonged period. In her final days, she was on oxygen support after doctors labelled her as “therapeutically incurable”.

Raju Ramchandra (20) represents everything that is wrong with the government-run Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP). An orphan, his tuberculosis deteriorated to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) though he was healthy until 2015-end. Now with a shrunken form, the whites of his eyes enlarged and voice feeble, he says he could not register for RNTCP in Virar because he had no necessary identification proof.

Seven-month-old Mohamed Afaan’s declining weight and constant throwing up kept baffling his father Gufran Malik. The baby, a patient of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), was under the government-funded treatment regime of seven drugs daily crushed into four parts, but was barely responding to the treatment. In June, when his weight dropped to 3.5 kg, field counsellors rushed him to a private doctor. What the counsellors realised was that Afaan was being administered medicines under the government’s free Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) that his body could not handle.

The beginning of bedaquiline medication will be a boost in the fight against the bacterial infection which has caused a rising incidence of multidrug-resistant (MDR-) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR-)TB cases in Mumbai.

On January 5 this year, Ahmad Khalid Mohammad’s family in Somalia wrote to his advocate in Mumbai. They pleaded to have Mohammad, currently in Taloja jail, shifted to a private hospital, and offered to pay the bills. One among the 100-odd alleged pirates arrested on the high seas in 2011, Mohammed, 30, suffers from a multi-drug resistant (MDR) strain of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). Their fears are not unfounded. The Indian Express has found that cases of TB in a Mumbai prison is eight times higher than the average prevalence in India.

A year after the Ministry of Health And Family Welfare (MoHFW) introduced the pilot project to offer free tuberculosis (TB) treatment for city patients, it has come to the fore that a significant 6,882 tuberculosis patients have been benefited by the service.