The threat of TB in India requires an interdisciplinary, patient-centric response

It’s been a few years but I clearly remember a visit to a chest ward in a hospital in Patna. Tuberculosis patients, their faces emaciated, lay on their beds, staring, coughing, in despair. These impoverished people had spent years and almost all of their savings on their treatment. A few of them, I was told by the hospital staff, had been abandoned, as their families could no longer afford the treatment.