Mumbai: For the city’s youngest TB patients—some younger than five years of age—visits to the state-run JJ Hospital’s paediatric department have meant taking potent antibiotics every day for 20 months and undergoing monthly scans to check their eyesight, nerve conduction and heart rhythm.To change this painful association with hospital visits, the staff on Monday, the eve of World TB Day, did something different: As many as 52 of them contributed between Rs 500 and Rs 5,000 to collect Rs 47,000 to provide nutritional supplies to 50 of the children. Head of the paediatric department Dr Chhaya Valvi said the basket contained a three-month supply of nuts, dates, pulses, oil, and other provisions.The Monday get-together marked almost four years of providing bedaquiline — one of the relatively new antibiotics to fight drug-resistant TB — to children under five years of age. The JJ paediatric department is only one of the two centres in the country that is authorised to do so, while older children can get it from any of the municipal TB centres. “In this period, 60 children under five years of age have been given bedaquiline for up to 20 months, depending on the severity of their disease,” said Dr Sushant Mane, who handles the paediatric TB programme in the hospital.As many as 30 of these under-five children have been cured of their extensively drug-resistant TB infection, while four died as they had disseminated TB (in which the bacteria spread via blood to multiple organs such as the liver, bone marrow or kidneys). The rest are in various stages of the treatment. Dr Mane said none of the children had suffered any complications related to bedaquiline. “We monitor each of the children’s eyesight, hearing, nerve conduction tests and heart function,” he said. In the first month of bedaquiline, the child’s ECG is done every week, and thereafter once a month till the child is on treatment. The hospital holds TB OPD once a week, with 40 patients turning up. “Every week, we get four to five new cases,” said the doctors. According to the BMC’s TB-related data for 2025, children make up 6% of the total burden of TB in the city. The JJ ‘bedaquiline for under-five’ programme has one objective — to underline the safety of the medicine for this age group. A research paper from Wadia Children’s Hospital in Parel showed that the drug is safe for this age group. Once the Drugs Controller General of India approves the use, the medicine can be distributed more widely.
