India is the country with the highest number of patients with active tuberculosis (TB). Emerging drug resistance poses a huge threat, but migration, urbanisation, poverty and the complexity of public and private healthcare challenge the control efforts as well. Innovation for TB control is urgently needed and is often imagined as providing new drugs, diagnostics and vaccines. In this book, Nora Engel argues that innovations of services, organisations, strategies and delivery mechanisms are crucial too.
In a unique analysis on how innovation for TB control is practised, this book provides extensive coverage of four cases of innovation in public TB control in India: the involvement of private sector players, the emerging policy responses to multidrug resistant TB, the development of new diagnostic technologies and of new treatment guidelines.
The book asks how diverse actors (public and private health providers, patients, activists, researchers and policymakers) engaged in TB control in India are balancing innovative activities with ongoing control work. This shows that innovation for TB control is not a linear process of improvement, but rather a complicated, continuous undertaking, in which different perspectives and practices often clash. How can innovation be fostered without jeopardising the control efforts? And how is an infectious disease to be controlled without stifling innovation?
Using approaches from science and technology studies (STS), innovation studies, medical anthropology and sociology, the book provides suggestions on how innovation and control could be balanced, and offers a relevant and unique contribution to the literature on innovation in global health and on TB in India.
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