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

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

Health News: 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.

Forty-year-old Noludwe Mabandlela, a single mother of two, received new TB drugs bedaquiline and delamanid for multi drug-resistant TB and, a year later, now hopes to make a full recovery. Here, she shows a photo of herself before she contracted MDR-TB. Until then, an ailing Mabandlela--who lives in Khayelitsha, South Africa’s largest township, or informal settlement, 30 km southeast of Cape Town--had been going to a private hospital, where she was not tested forTB. Government health staff started Mabandlela on MDR-TB treatment, which included taking injectable drugs for six months. She developed side-effects from the...read more

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