The discovery of an almost untreatable form of tuberculosis in India has set off alarm bells around the world and helped spur a dramatic expansion of government efforts to battle the killer lung disease.
For the past decade, a nationwide tuberculosis program involving millions of health workers and volunteers has made slow but significant progress in battling the disease in India and has been hailed as a public-health success story. But any sense of complacency was dispelled in December when a doctor in Mumbai, Zarir Udwadia, discovered a strain of the disease that did not respond to any of the 12 frontline drugs. He declared a handful of patients at his chest clinic in Mumbai to be suffering from “totally drug-resistant TB.”
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