India needs to fight multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, before it gets late

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

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