Antibiotics are not enough

In 1882 Robert Koch announced his discovery of the causative agent of tuberculosis, which was a steep turn in the history of the disease. About a century later, in the 1990s, multidrug resistance to tuberculosis emerged as a potential threat to tuberculosis control programmes worldwide.1 The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization surveyed an international network of tuberculosis laboratories and found that in 2000-4 of the 17,690 tuberculous isolates, 20% were of multidrug resistant tuberculosis.2

Tuberculosis in India is not just a disease to be treated with antibiotics but an entity with historical and cultural roots that run far and deep. Tuberculosis is popularly known as “kshayarog” in many parts of the India because of the spitting of blood and loss of weight associated with the disease. “Kshaya” means gradual wasting or weakness and “rog” means disease, so kshayarog means a disease with gradual wasting and weakness. The term can be used for other chronic illnesses too, but it is specifically used to refer to tuberculosis in ayurvedic textbooks. This is because tuberculosis was the most common disease that caused chronic wasting …