What can be done to tackle multi-drug resistant TB?

Socios En Salud in the community

“It’s a model that saves lives,” said Lecca in an interview at the headquarters of Partners In Health in downtown Boston, where he came for training in July. “Fighting TB is not just taking pills. It’s fighting poverty.”

In Peru, where a third of the population of 30 million lives in poverty, every year tuberculosis affects 33,000 people and kills 4,000. Of the affected, 1,200 cases are MDR TB and about 80 are XDR. In 2010, Peru had the highest number of multidrug-resistant TB cases in the Americas.

Although over the years the number of deaths from tuberculosis in Peru have declined and detection and access to treatment have improved due to the work led by Socios En Salud, there is still much to do. Despite Peru’s booming economy that has lifted thousands of people out of poverty and into the middle class, tuberculosis is far from conquered.

In Carabayllo, the impoverished district where Socios En Salud started its revolutionary work 19 years ago, TB cases are on the rise. To eliminate tuberculosis in the district, the organization launched the TB Zero program a few weeks ago with the support of the local municipality.

“Overcoming TB is not just an NGO’s job,” said Arturo Tapia, another physician working with Socios en Salud. “It’s everybody’s job.”

To help cure patients, the organization provides free medication, food coupons, and even small business training and micro-credits to help patients make a living. Sometimes, patients have their modest houses remodeled to make sure they meet sanitary conditions.

The group has joined forces with the Peruvian Ministry of Health to treat multidrug-resistant TB. It’s a partnership that allowed Peru in 2012 to achieve a higher cure rate in MDR TB (75 percent) than the rest of the world had (48 percent), according to the World Health Organization.

Even driver Javier Yataco, who has worked for Socios En Salud for 13 years transporting patients from their homes to health centers because they’re too sick to walk, has noticed the changes.

“When I first began to work here, of 10 sick people, only one survived,” he said. “Now it’s the other way around. Of 10, nine survive.”

For Karim Llaro, who is in charge of the programs in Carabayllo, the key to success is the community-based model.

“We offer not only medicines; we offer social and emotional support,” she said. “We assign them a health worker who accompanies them throughout the treatment and is trained to give moral and psychological support.”

At her modest home, perched precariously on a rocky hill, Matos, who’s halfway through her two-year-long treatment, agrees. She greeted Bertha Huaman, her nursing assistant, with a hug and a kiss on the cheek when she arrived (late, because of the traffic jams that clog Lima’s roads).

As Huaman gave an injection to her patient, Matos’ face contorted in pain.

“Before I got sick, there was no pain in my life,” Matos said.

“Don’t feel sad,” Huaman told Matos as the sun came through a window. “Because if you do, the medicine won’t work.”

This article is published in collaboration with Harvard Gazette. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Liz Mineo is a Harvard Correspondent. 

Image: Pharmaceutical tablets and capsules in foil strips are arranged on a table in this picture illustration taken in Ljubljana September 18, 2013. REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic