It is the poor who are usually hardest hit. Living in crowded or unclean areas, they tend to be more exposed to TB germs. Once infected, the poor are more likely to develop the disease because their immune systems may find the illness harder to fight. An estimated three-quarters of the TB cases detected in India this past year were in poor, rural areas. But the onus should be on the health service to make sure people take their medicine.
Tuberculosis is as simple and cheap to cure as it is easy to spread.
Nearly all of its victims could survive if they stuck to the strict regimen of antibiotics. But since symptoms abate within a few weeks many patients, thinking they are cured, often stop taking the medicine. Others run out of money to pay for it. Health-care workers can contribute to the problem. A WHO study found that 100 doctors in Bombay were using 80 different drug combinations to cure TB, most of them inappropriate.