Speech by Mr Ram Khadka

PERSONAL TESTIMONY BY MR RAM KHADKA, TB PATIENT, NEPAL AT THE MINISTERIAL CONFERENCE
ON TB & SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

THURSDAY 23 MARCH

Honourable Ministers, Distinguished Guests, and respected participants of this Conference. I am very pleased to have this opportunity to express my real and individual experience of TB.

TB, this evil, took the lives of both my father and mother when I was younger and keeps me far from the warm love and lap of my parents. My name is Ram Khadka. I am a teacher and I live in the Kathmandu valley with my brother and grandfather. We are the victims of TB.

While he was in the army my father got TB. The treatment was not successful and he died fifteen years ago. My mother became a widow.

TB killed my mother just three years ago and my brother and I became orphans. She was treated for six years in different places and took many kinds of drugs irregularly. Eventually she developed MDR-TB. She was hospitalized for nearly forty-five days, and I was waiting for the angel of death in the hospital. She suffered terribly. When I was there, the doctors and other hospital staff saw the state. I got sick from TB. They took my sputum and did a test X-ray and told me I had TB.

I started DOTS treatment while my mother was still alive. One month later she died. I visited hospital three times a week for my treatment and I was rescued from TB in this way. But it took the lives of both of my parents, which is sorrowful for the sons like us. I lost the dearest ones on this earth.

Though it is not a recently emerging problem, we are still not able to eradicate this grand problem from the world. History shows us that it took the lives of too many great learners and scholars. It is growing even more serious day to day because of HIV and MDR-TB. Thus, if the world governments need to stay forward urgently and support each and every stage of eradication of TB from this world, or soon the whole world will be a place like hell and won't be a living place.

The organizers, governments, NGOs and WHO are working together to eradicate TB have to involve people like us, who had the bitter and hard experience of TB. The involvement of technical manpower alone will not be the entire solution to the problem. There needs to be a change in the attitude of people. They must know that TB can be cured. We know it because we have had TB. You must listen to us and hear our hard and bitter experience of TB. Thus, I would like to make my request from this grand conference at the beginning of 2000 to the world governments and all the distinguished guests in this ceremony to take action together, to promise together, to secure together, and eradicate tuberculosis forever from this world.

Thank you for your attention.