New Delhi: The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to examine a doctor’s claim that India’s "unscientific" tuberculosis protocol stipulates an inadequate medicine regime to cut costs, thus promoting relapses and generating lethal drug-resistant strains.
The court did not issue a formal notice to the government but asked additional solicitor-general Maninder Singh to talk to the petitioner, Raman Kakar, and get back to the court.
Kakar has argued that the current Indian practice of giving tuberculosis patients "three doses of medicines per week" should be replaced with the traditional and time-tested "daily dose" regimen.
"Giving only 3 doses (instead of 7) 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," the petition says.
Kakar has said that over 10 per cent of Indian tuberculosis patients suffer a relapse compared with the global average of 3 per cent, and blamed the thrice-weekly regimen. He has added that relapsed cases are harder to treat than first-time infections.
His petition says that even after an Indian patient has had a relapse, the inadequate doses continue.
"A Category II patient (one whose disease has relapsed) in India is given only 24 injections (of the antibacterial streptomycin) while everywhere else in the world such a patient generally gets 60 injections!"
Rather than contributing towards the disease’s eradication, therefore, India’s tuberculosis control programme is, through its high recurrence levels, generating drug-resistant strains "on an industrial scale" that are endangering the entire human species, the petition says.