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Anurag Bhargava's essay on the strong relationship between tuberculosis and undernutrition is an important contribution to the debate on the wider intersection between tuberculosis and poverty. His specific arguments for a) the return to diet as a therapeutic weapon against TB, and b) the use of diet as an 'oral vaccine' that is a cheap, easy to deploy and humane TB preventive strategy are compelling.
Embedded in Bhargava's plea for diet augmentation is also the explicit argument about the importance of the quality of diet and its nutritive biochemical balance to ensure adequate absorption. Such a specific argument in relation to tuberculosis should also be seen as countering the perennial threat in Indian neoliberal thinking to cut food subsidies. It is a plea to widen the subsidy to include non-cereal elements like eggs, milk and flesh foods to ensure dietary biochemical balance.
Investment in the body of the citizen through balanced nutrition improves productivity through increased human energy and lower absenteeism due to ill health. It also improves the strength of the market consumer through better wage earning and a wider distribution of wealth. To make in India, one must make the Indian worker-citizen stronger.
Perhaps it is time for the WHO and other institutions to begin treating specific disease indices like that of tuberculosis as indicative of a wider developmental malaise (as are mother and child mortality for instance). Indices of tuberculosis incidence also point to a sickness of the 'economy' which needs to be tackled through a much broader set of actions which are to use an old fashioned word, 'intersectoral'. Such a far sighted global strategy alone will ensure that national policy with regard to food does not collapse into a myopic neoliberal mindset.
Re: Undernutrition, nutritionally acquired immunodeficiency, and tuberculosis control
Anurag Bhargava's essay on the strong relationship between tuberculosis and undernutrition is an important contribution to the debate on the wider intersection between tuberculosis and poverty. His specific arguments for a) the return to diet as a therapeutic weapon against TB, and b) the use of diet as an 'oral vaccine' that is a cheap, easy to deploy and humane TB preventive strategy are compelling.
Embedded in Bhargava's plea for diet augmentation is also the explicit argument about the importance of the quality of diet and its nutritive biochemical balance to ensure adequate absorption. Such a specific argument in relation to tuberculosis should also be seen as countering the perennial threat in Indian neoliberal thinking to cut food subsidies. It is a plea to widen the subsidy to include non-cereal elements like eggs, milk and flesh foods to ensure dietary biochemical balance.
Investment in the body of the citizen through balanced nutrition improves productivity through increased human energy and lower absenteeism due to ill health. It also improves the strength of the market consumer through better wage earning and a wider distribution of wealth. To make in India, one must make the Indian worker-citizen stronger.
Perhaps it is time for the WHO and other institutions to begin treating specific disease indices like that of tuberculosis as indicative of a wider developmental malaise (as are mother and child mortality for instance). Indices of tuberculosis incidence also point to a sickness of the 'economy' which needs to be tackled through a much broader set of actions which are to use an old fashioned word, 'intersectoral'. Such a far sighted global strategy alone will ensure that national policy with regard to food does not collapse into a myopic neoliberal mindset.
Competing interests: No competing interests