MDR-TB

I was watching TV last weekend and saw this episode called "Rx for Survival" on PBS. It was about people in areas around Lima, Peru where patients were suffering from multi-drug resistant or MDR tuberculosis. This form of TB is very severe and very difficult and also very costly to treat. There were two doctors working through Partner in Health that tried to help patients with this disease but the Peruvian government just deemed the patients "too expensive to treat" and just hoped their death would help end the epidemic. These two doctors acted on robin hood type methods to try and treat these patients. They would borrow drugs from several colleages and it even showed on the TV show how they would smuggle them into the country in their suitcases. They would teach the local nurses, or anyone that was willing to help, how to treat and take care of these highly-contagious people. Their entire works on this were documented on this show as it followed a few people with this disease and how complex it was to treat.

Here is the link to the summary of the TV show:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/series/dispatches/something-truly-ambitous.html