Prohibition was recently enacted in the Indian state of Bihar, but the ban is also affecting alcohol used for medical procedures, reports Medscape.
“So far, we were using the old stock of alcohol and spirits to conduct tests but now, they too have run short completely. We are unable to conduct any TB test until we get the fresh stock,” said Bihar’s Communicable Diseases Officer Ganesh Prasad.
“Their scarcity is now bound to hit the TB diagnosis programme but we are helpless,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that substitutes had proved ineffective.
Despite progress over the past two decades, TB infected 9 million people and killed 1.5 million in 2013, according to the World Health Organization.
India has one of the world’s highest caseloads of TB. Government data shows there were over 1.7 million cases in 2016 – more than 5 percent of them from Bihar.
Read more at www.medscape.com
