Treatment of tuberculosis: is our knowledge adequate?

Tuberculosis remains a global problem even after the excellent drugs available to cure it. Inappropriate and inadequate treatment leads to acquired drug resistance, which may result in treatment failure and spread of resistant organisms to other persons. Our study was aimed at finding out the current status of knowledge, attitude and practice of resident doctors and consultants medical institutes in two different parts of India. All the residents and consultants were given a questioner containing twenty questions based on WHO guidelines for treatment of tuberculosis and the positive responses were calculated. The results were tabulated in the form of percentage of correct responses to individual queries. 80 doctors responded by filling up the questioner. None of the respondents could correctly answer all 20 questions. Only four could answer more than 75% questions correctly and only 17 could answer at least 50% of the questions correctly. 17.5% respondents could not even answer 25% questions correctly. The details of answer to individual queries presents a dismal picture. This study looked at their present knowledge attitude and treatment practice of a very common but serious disease like tuberculosis and the inadequacy of our knowledge in this regards should make us think about reshaping our policies for managing tuberculosis.