The book was launched as part of a SATB’s ongoing campaign to bring more attention to patient centric TB care and support in India
As a run up to World TB Day, Survivors Against TB (SATB) launched Nine Lives- Women and Tuberculosis in India, a book chronicling the journey and struggles of nine female TB survivors who battled and defeated TB in India. The book was launched as part of a SATB’s ongoing campaign to bring more attention to patient centric TB care and support in India.
“When we began documenting these stories, we wanted to record the lived journeys of women surviving TB in a patriarchal society where they often have limited access to health services and little agency to negotiate their own well-being. They live with stigma, fear and discrimination when infected with TB. Even when cured, they are told never to talk of TB again, as if it were somehow their failing, their fault,” says Zarah Udwadia and Chapal Mehra, authors of the book.
These stories have been put together in an attempt to help people understand the numerous challenges that these women and their families face to defeat TB. The volume ends with a set of recommendations that have been put together with inputs from female survivors, experts and programme planners. The intention in doing so is to provide a roadmap to make TB services and the health system more responsive to gender specific needs.
“Hopefully, these stories will spur decision makers to act on these recommendations. There is an increased need to recognise that the way women experience, live and fight TB or any other disease is different, and our society and health system needs to respond to them more sensitively,” says Deepti Chavan an MDR TB survivor, featured in the book.
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