
Contagion
Tuberculosis kills 1.4 million people worldwide in 2011 alone, and India carries a disproportionate share of the burden. This 101 East report follows the disease through Mumbai's Hinduja Hospital, where Dr. Zarir Udwadia and his colleagues encounter patients resistant to all twelve drugs then used against TB, a strain they call Totally Drug Resistant. One woman, he recalls, traveled a thousand kilometers across two states after five years of failed treatment. Dr. Peter Small of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation explains the airborne mechanics that make the disease, in his words, everywhere once it exists anywhere. The film tracks how misdiagnosis and incomplete courses of the standard forty-year-old drug regimen have let the bacteria adapt, and how the Indian government and the WHO initially dismissed the Mumbai doctors' findings rather than acting on them. Official figures put multi-drug-resistant cases at 66,000 nationwide; doctors interviewed here believe the real number runs higher, hidden inside families too poor to keep pursuing a diagnosis.