The elimination of tuberculosis cannot be achieved if medicines are locked in a “patent panoply,” according to Indian author and journalist Vidya Kishnan.
Speaking to Garry Aslanyan on the most recent episode of Dialogues, a new series from the Global Health Matters podcast, the author of “Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History” said that “everything that happened in COVID has been happening for decades with TB.
“In India, the entire TB program got ‘Covidized,’ down to the helpline of the Ministry [of Health], and infections and respiratory diseases don’t simply go away,” Kishnan said. “So, the first thing we need to do is look at how technology is transferred because vaccines and drugs first and foremost, it’s technology. It’s somebody’s intellectual property. And I feel like TB elimination cannot, will not be achieved if the medicines, the latest most humane therapy, is locked in a patent panoply.”