Fighting drug-resistant TB: What India can learn from S Africa's success

If India follows new World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines released in August 2018 and reiterated on December 21, 2018, other drug-resistant TB patients will not have to struggle similarly

In July 2017, 40-year-old Noludwe Mabandlela, a single mother of two, collapsed at home. This ended up saving her life. The ambulance that responded took Mabandlela to the nearest government community health centre, where she was diagnosed with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). As the name suggests, first-line drugs such as rifampicin used to treat the more common, drug-sensitive TB don’t work on MDR-TB, from which patients have an increased risk of death and from which they take two years to recover, compared to six months in conventional TB.