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Is India’s new approach to TB “complete nonsense”?

Today carried a Wall Street Journal article which rings many alarm bells on India’s new strategy for dealing with TB resistant to most antibiotics treatment. The WSJ has run a series of articles on this subject over the past year but this is a new claim: that India’s emergency strategy is now “encouraging TB to instead mutate into more deadly and unstoppable strains.” This week’s Lancet has a short piece from Zarir Udwadia, the doctor who first reported virtually untreatable TB in Mumbai last year. He is lending strong support to the WHO’s obsession of the moment: a new category of drugs that would be unavailable in pharmacies except through special coupons. India’s Health Minister is believed to be resisting part of this change because it might disadvantage the rural poor. His reservations appear to have grown as international organisations try to add non-antibiotics to this list (for example through yet another attempt to control dispensing of some psycho-active medicines)

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