Patients denied access to new TB drug, says Mumbai doctor

national tuberculosis (TB) control programme is denying ‘desperate’ patients access to the new drug, bedaquiline, said a Mumbai doctor in an article in the latest edition of the international medical JournalThe Lancet.

Bedaquiline is the first anti-TB drug to be rolled out in the last 40 years and is a ray of hope for ‘extremely drug resistant’ cases of TB, which are immune to regular drugs and are very difficult to treat. Patients with such complications have high mortality rates.

Dr Zarir Udwadia, a chest phy, who routinely sees severely ‘drug resistant’ cases of TB, wrote the article and said that “India’s National Tuberculosis Control Programme’s insistence on reserving bedaquiline for patients who have at least three susceptible drugs in the background regimen, denies the drug to the patients who would most benefit from it, especially since it doubles the chance of a cure.”

“It worries us that such patients, denied access to a lifesaving drug, are compelled to move the judiciary to access it,” he added, referring to the case of an 18-year old woman from Patna, whose father moved the Delhi HC , after she was denied the drug at Lala Ram Sarup TB Hospital on the grounds that she was not a resident of Delhi. The woman was also resistant to more than three drugs, mandatory before a TB patient is administred bedequilline.

While she was eventually given access to drug after the court ruled in her favour, there are many patients who don’t have access to the drug as the government has rolled it out on a trial basis at limited centres in India. “The woman’s case is emblematic of the desperation of the many patients with advanced drug resistance and with few therapeutic options that we encounter in our clinic,” wrote Dr Udwadia.