‘Patients are falling through the cracks’: drug costs hinder India’s response to TB

Meera Yadav, a tuberculosis survivor and activist, in Mumbai – where more than 10% of India’s multi-drug-resistant TB cases last year were recorded. Photograph: Catherine Davison

Meera Yadav’s flat in Mumbai once felt like a prison, but it’s now a war room. For five years, Yadav barely left her second-storey home after being diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). Today the flat is where the 32-year-old coordinates her fight for better treatment and awareness of the disease.

“What TB patients suffer and the challenges they face has to be documented. As an activist I have to fight,” says Yadav, dressed in a T-shirt bearing the slogan “TB drug bedaquiline for $1 a day – better DR-TB treatment now!”