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Millions of TB patients in India have no food, weigh less than 20 kg -Charu Bahri

-Business Standard/ India Spend

Under-nutrition increases the severity of TB, reduces patients' speed of recovery

Mt Abu/Abu Road: One look at Puni Garasia, 14, was all it took Ashok Dave, a doctor operating a charitable mobile clinic service for 56 dusty, desolate hamlets in Sirohi, southwest Rajasthan, to suspect tuberculosis (TB).

“She was all skin and bones,” Dave, an employee of Global Hospital & Research Centre, a health not-for-profit, told IndiaSpend.

On March 24, 2017, World TB Day, the government released a guideline: Nutritional Care & Support for TB Patients in India, the first country-level adaptation of the 2013 World Health Organization guideline for the nutritional care and support of TB patients. Low weight is a classic symptom of TB, a disease associated with wasting away of fat and muscle.
Undernutrition increases the severity of TB, reduces patients’ speed of recovery, and increases their chances of suffering side effects from the medicine, and the likelihood of their becoming one of the 480,000 Indian lives that TB, an infectious airborne disease, claims every year.

When Puni, a tribal from Bhaisasingh village in Sirohi district, came into the mobile clinic, she weighed 20 kg, and had a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 9.9 kg/m2, a level that is “incompatible with life”, said Anurag Bhargava, professor in the Department of Medicine, Yenepoya Medical College, Mangalore, who coordinated with nutritional experts in drafting the new guidelines. The desirable BMI level is 18.5 kg/m2, the ideal 21 kg/m2.

A sputum test confirmed that her body–racked by fever and a persistent cough, other classic symptoms of TB–was indeed being consumed by mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Over the six months following this October 2016 diagnosis, Jayantilal, a health worker living and working in Puni’s village, personally dispensed every dose of the prescribed TB medicines freely available under the Indian government’s Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP), and doled out six kilograms each of roasted soy bean and gram, under a nutrition-support initiative for TB patients by the same charity that Dave works for.

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