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Notice (8): Undefined variable: urlPrefix [APP/Template/Layout/printlayout.ctp, line 8]latest-news-updates/tb-dosage-deadline-4680977.html"/> LATEST NEWS UPDATES | TB dosage deadline | Im4change.org
Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

TB dosage deadline

-The Telegraph

New Delhi: The Supreme Court today directed the Centre to take a call by Friday on providing daily doses of medicine to tuberculosis patients in place of the prevailing thrice-a-week regimen that is considered ineffective to combat the disease.

A bench, headed by Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar, said people could not be allowed to suffer till June 2018, the cut-off date proposed by the Centre to introduce the daily-dose regimen after exhausting existing stocks of the thrice-a-week drugs.

"People will suffer in the meantime. It is a question of health of the people. You have the drug. You want to say you want to introduce it. These are all regime changes which you say you want to introduce," the bench, also comprising Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and L. Nageswara Rao, told additional solicitor-general Maninder Singh.

The apex court was dealing with a PIL filed by one Raman Kakar who sought a ban on the practice of administering only "three doses of medicines per week" to all TB patients and replacing it with the time-tested "daily dose regimen" (seven doses per week).

During the brief arguments, the ASG told the court that the Centre agreed with the petitioner's argument that the world over patients were administered daily anti-TB doses. But it wanted time till June 2018 to exhaust the existing stocks of thrice-a-week doses.

In the petition, Kakar argued that India's DOTS model was "unscientific, ineffective and harmful". DOTS refers to "directly observed treatment, short-course" -- a tuberculosis control strategy adopted by the World Health Organisation.

"Giving only three doses (instead of seven) per week reduces cost (to 43 per cent). But it also means drastic reduction of drug-intake, which truncates therapy, weakens it, wrenches out its very soul.

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