Poonam is chirpy and charming with childish innocence. Unfortunately, in 2014, Poonam was diagnosed with TB and then almost a year later with MDR-TB.

MBA professional and TB survivor-Champion Abhishek Kumar hails from Vaishali in Bihar. He is an entrepreneur who runs a mobile and online ticketing shop with his father in his village. He was diagnosed with MDR-TB in 2014 when he was working as a banquet sales executive at a hotel in Bangalore. During a regular check-up, a chest X-Ray detected an infection in the lungs, and he was subsequently diagnosed with TB. He returned home and approached a doctor at a private hospital, who started him on treatment.

World TB day is observed on 24th of March every year. This year’s theme is “The Clock is Ticking”. This day is designed to raise public awareness about the TB epidemic, which is still the number one killer globally among infectious diseases. Tuberculosis is a curable and preventable disease. The global burden of the disease attributes to delay and poor diagnostic and inadequate treatments, which leads to the severity of the disease with an increase in mortality rate and the spike in transmission and development of drug resistance. TB does not spare any country in the world, even though it unreasonably impacts LMIC (lower- to middle-income countries). A total of 3% of global TB cases occur in the WHO European Region. In the US, about 13 million people live with latent TB.

Even as the world comes to grips with the mounting death toll due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the WHO released its 2020 Global Tuberculosis Report last week. The news is not good. Nearly 1.4 million people died from TB in 2019. Of the estimated 10 million people who developed TB that year, some 3 million were either not diagnosed, or were not officially reported to national authorities.

A six-month-long duration of TB treatment under the DOTS programme is fraught with issues like non-compliance by patients, mix up of drugs, etc., contributing to the emergence of multi-drug-resistant TB. Shortening the duration of treatment has been a priority area in the TB drug discovery research efforts. In a recent Phase 3 clinical trial (Study 31/A5349), a 4-month regimen is as efficacious as the 6-month regimen for treatment of drug-susceptible tuberculosis in patients. This landmark breakthrough is expected to strengthen the global efforts for the elimination of TB by 2030.

Vaccines have played a major role in our efforts to control many bacterial and viral infectious diseases. Smallpox is the classical example of a viral disease that has been eradicated primarily by using an effective vaccine.