Bangladesh's warriors fight TB

UNITED WE STAND: An army of housewives are making a huge difference in the battle against tuberculosis.

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Keywords: Tuberculosis, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee

Gazipur (Bangladesh): It is a deadly disease that kills nearly one-and half million people every year around the globe and Bangladesh accounts for 70,000 of those who die from tuberculosis.

But an army of housewives are making a huge difference in the battle against tuberculosis.

Six days a week, every morning, 39-year-old Firoza Khatun leaves her village home and child behind.

For a ritual that is changing people's lives in rural Bangladesh, the housewife goes around every house in her village and three neighbouring villages as well.

Knocking on doors behind which lie a fatal disease, saving lives of people like Zahida who suffer from tuberculosis.

Firoza gives medicines to such patients and then ticks off a treatment chart. She conducts daily household surveys in the villages, hunts for new patients who have been coughing for more than three weeks, sweet-talks them into getting tested and then administers a long and rigorous treatment.

“People in the village don’t know about tuberculosis. I make them understand, get some money and earn a lot of respect,” says Firoza.

This routine plays out in countless villages across this country every morning. It’s a simple but remarkably effective innovation by NGOs like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), which have stepped in to take charge of the national tuberculosis treatment program.

“If they had not come, we would have suffered from this disease continuously,” says a tuberculosis patient, Zahida.

BRAC also actively recruits new housewives every month and meetings are held across hundreds of villages to find new heath volunteers.

At the same time, it has been a difficult experiment in a conservative Muslim country where housewives are hardly allowed to leave their house.

While 89 per cent of those infected with the disease are getting cured, among the 22 countries that are considered to be heavily burdened by tuberculosis, few have reached these levels of success.

Despite all it's shortcomings, Bangladesh still has a huge potential to grow. It has a wide variety of natural resources and the economy is growing.

But to go to the next level, the country needs to correct the mistakes of the past and forget the demons that have haunted this country for several years now and then Bangladesh can play a major role in south Asia.