Her family, which survives on a meager income from three milking cows, sunk deeper and deeper in debt to pay the bills. The girl lay bedridden. Doctors there promptly determined that Chaitanya was one of the two million people who develop tuberculosis each year in India, more than in any other country. Today, on World Tuberculosis Day, President Bill Clinton gave this little girl with dark brown eyes and long braids her final dose of the medicines that will cure her, and he signed the register that has documented each stage of her six-month treatment. Chaitanya's is one of 40,000 lives that experts say have been saved by the use of a treatment that is popular here.
Paramedics monitor the patients' records to double-check that the treatment is proceeding properly.
Last month a team of experts from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Bank, working with India's leading tuberculosis specialists, interviewed 1,000 patients and reviewed the records of more than 10,000 to evaluate the strategy, which has been used in India since 1993. They discovered that this method, known as directly observed treatment, short course, or DOTS, has doubled cure rates to 84 percent and cut death rates to 4 percent from 29 percent. Almost a quarter of a million people with tuberculosis, which is caused by bacteria and spreads through the air when an untreated patient coughs or talks, have been given the treatment in India. Still, it is available to only about 15 percent of India's population of one billion. The challenge in this vast, impoverished country with its shaky public health system is to expand the program, and fast.