Washington Post examines India's efforts against TB amid fears of drug resistance

The Washington Post examines how the "discovery of an almost untreatable form of tuberculosis [TB] 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." The newspaper writes, "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."

According to the Washington Post, the government "recently announced a fourfold increase in the budget to fight tuberculosis in its next five-year plan, the expansion of a nationwide network of costly labs capable of detecting drug-resistant strains of the disease, and the first concerted effort to bring on board India's poorly regulated private health care sector." The newspaper discusses India's efforts against the disease over the past two decades and writes, "The government, [Udwadia] said, has 'moved up a gear' in the race against TB, although he worries it is 'too late and too little'" (Denyer, 9/5). The article is accompanied by an infographic (9/5).