EKTA NIKETAN TB CENTRE

Our news; your views.

NEWS & VIEWS

TB is more than a medical condition. TB is a disease of poverty. TB is a perfect expression of an imperfect society. TB is about misery, about inequality, about injustice. TB is about failures of TB experts at the WHO; TB is about deception by politicians and policy makers at national levels. TB is a disease of the fourth world.

This section will bring their stories - Baldev Das, Chandoni of Noahara, and many more; also from Tikla and Rashmuni, and others at Ekta Niketan. These are real life stories; some of them have featured in videos; so please visit our Gallery

Ekta Niketan is a learning centre of tuberculosis - understanding the real cause of the disease. Each patient at Ekta Niketan is a story - they bring news of extreme poverty, deception and their helplessness.

The spread of tuberculosis in India is a serious concern. The situation is likely to get worse in the coming years with resistant forms of the bacteria evolving as a result of severe shortages of first line drugs during 2023-24, just when post-Covid TB elimination efforts were at their height, and when the International TB expert reiterated India eliminating TB by December 2025. It is worth finding out if there are more ‘relapse’ TB patients as a result of earlier inadequate and incomplete anti-TB treatments due to drug shortages, also the efficacy of TB drugs itself. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?

YOUR VIEWS

TB experts of the government need to go back to basics, at the minimum ensure that people access treatment free of cost, continue and complete the full course of treatment, and have adequate nutritious food supplements at least during the first two months of treatment. Instead, Experts seem to be complacent with India’s TB elimination hype. Instead of looking into the proportion of patients accessing private clinics, then discontinuing treatments because of the costs they cannot afford, the delay in initiating and completing the full course of standard treatment, the extent of ‘relapse’ TB patients attending TB centres, and giving undivided attention to strategies to reach out people in remote villages, in urban slums, migrant workers and people living near mines and associated industries, they now talk about new diagnostics and treatment strategies - phasing out sputum microscopy replacing AI assisted X-ray, combining Ayurveda in TB treatment. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?