Fighting TB in Bangladesh

Today's NYT features an article on the work of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, or BRAC, which employs nearly 70,000 women across the country as TB outreach workers. These women, mostly housewives, earn $2.50 per patient they identify and monitor, administering treatment and other health care advice. Their role in ensuring patient compliance with the long treatments required for TB is especially important, as TB-treatment that is not followed can lead to the development of resistant strands of the disease.

Beyond the health benefits of the program, it has also elevated the status of the women enrolled in the program. Reported one participant, "When she started doing the rounds 12 years ago, some of the village leaders, all men, waved sticks and shouted insults...They said it was unbecoming of a Muslim woman to go door to door through the village. Now, she said, one of her most strident former critics salutes her when she crosses his path. She thinks it is because she sold some cough syrup for one of the children in his family and it made the child feel better.
Her own financial health has improved as well. She makes her own money, modest though it is, from the sale of medicines. No longer, she said, must she cup her hands before her husband, who works as a rickshaw driver."

Learn more about BRAC here: http://www.brac.net/about.htm and read the entire NYT article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/world/asia/05bangla.html?pagewanted=1

TB isn't something most of us regularly worry about in the US, but worldwide it is a devastating illness. Doctors Without Borders/MSF reports that in countries with high rates of HIV/AIDS, multi-drug resistant strands of TB%