Preventing tuberculosis deaths in India

November 17, 2010

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot with gold threads, Runi is followed by several of her children. Although she can’t remember their ages, or her own, Runi must be about forty, because she dates her life from its first crucial memory: the smallpox epidemic that devastated Patna and much of surrounding Bihar province in 1974. (The New Yorker)