Today’s activity: seeing the tuberculosis wards.
Again today was filled with finding out differences of how tuberculosis is taken care of in India versus back at our hospital in the U.S. You are probably not surprised to hear, it’s different. Why is it different? Let’s start with the volume of patients. In the last year in Detroit, I saw two tuberculosis patients. Here, I lost count.
We are at a tuberculosis and lung center.
So naturally, there’s a ton of TB.
There are two wards just for MDR/XDR TB. (If you don’t know what this means, just know it’s not good. It’s tuberculosis that is super resistant or extremely resistant to the standard drugs we use).
There is a total of 20 beds for MDR/XDR TB here, and often they are full. Each patient is in a negative pressure room, where the air they breath is pulled out of the room, through a filter, and outside. This helps prevent transmission to other people. Back home, we do negative pressure for every single patient, even if TB isn’t high in the differential, but made it in someone’s mind as a possibility.
There are other wards for the good old fashion, susceptible to the normal drugs, tuberculosis. They are all placed together in this other ward. Once again, at home, we treat our “ruling out TB” with as many precautions as they treat XDR here. They tell me there’s no need to individually isolate the patients of this ward because they all have it, and it’s all the same (not resistant). I guess in a world with such high prevalence of TB, it makes sense.
All I can say is, don’t forget your N-95 mask!
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