Experiences of Tuberculosis in a Tarai Village, Nepal

Abstract

The focus of this article is the experience of being a Tuberculosis (TB) patient in rural Nepal. The National Tuberculosis Control Programme was launched shortly after the political change in 1951. It fought a losing battle up until 1995 when Nepal aligned itself with WHO’s global policy prescription of Directly Observed Treatment, Shortcourse (DOTS). The National Tuberculosis Programme (NTP) has since made exemplary progress with antiTB services widely available through the general health services and through NTP partner organizations. Even so, in Nepal, approximately 40,000 develop active TB annually and 5,000-7,000 die from the disease (Engelbrektsson & Subedi, 2017). Tuberculosis (TB) occurs not only in the body, but in time, in place, in history, in the lives of men and women, and in communities. The experience, “the lived-in reality of a sickness”, as suggested by Kleinman (1985, p.55) and by Atre et al. (2004), is created out of the dialectic between socio-cultural responses and personal signification on the one side (Auer et al., 2000) and the brute materiality of disordered biological processes on the other hand. The objective of the research was to gain insights into the experience of being a TB patient in rural Nepal. The health-seeking process; being on treatment; perceptions of TB; social interaction; and economic costs are the major themes of this article. Moreover, dissimilarities in perceptions of and approaches to adult-TB versus ChildTB (bal-tibi) are highlighted.