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Zarir Udwadia (born 1960) is an acclaimed Indian pulmonologist and researcher, known for his extensive work on drug resistant tuberculosis.

He was the only doctor to be named amongst India's best strategists.

He has run a free weekly TB clinic for more than two decades. He set it up when he returned to India in 1991, after his training in the UK, because he initially had few patients, and wanted to keep himself busy. It is now the busiest outpatient clinic at the Hinduja hospital.

Some of the most critical patients, often those with virtually no hope, and their families, crowd his free clinic. Many wait overnight hoping to be seen by him.

Drug Resistant Tuberculosis
When Dr Udwadia, an acclaimed pulmonologist, wrote in a medical journal in 2012 about a virtually untreatable form of TB, the ordinary Indian did not know who he was. But the letter set off a frenzy in the medical community and eventually made him one of India's best known doctors, and a man who reminded the country of its growing epidemic of TB and drug-resistant TB (DR TB) - a type of tuberculosis which is unresponsive to at least two of the first line of anti-TB drugs.

The journal letter prompted extensive media attention. Government officials publicly denied the issue, accused him of wrongly spreading panic, and a Mumbai health official seized his laboratory patient samples.

His research on TDR revolutionised the way TB is managed in India, and elsewhere, and his study forced the government to tweak the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme, the state-run TB control initiative.

He is an outspoken critic of the government's failures to address the TB problem, and a vocal advocate for better treatment for.

Dr. Udwadia refuses to wear a mask to protect himself, saying he cannot connect to his patients if he were to wear one.

Dr Udwadia describes MDR-TB, which is resistant to multiple drugs, as a "ticking time bomb" that could reverse the progress India has made so far in its battle against the infection.

He believes India needs to adopt newer technologies such as the GeneXpert, a molecular test that detects the presence of TB bacteria.

“The need of the hour is to get the best second-line drugs to the hundreds of thousands of MDR-TB patients who otherwise die for lack of access,” he adds. A crucial step towards treating TB, MDR-TB, or XDR-TB, would be to diagnose it right so that appropriate treatment can be given.

He is the first to isolate the HIV 2 virus from the lung of a patient. Udwadia and his team conducted a survey last year among Mumbai's private practitioners which revealed that only three out of 106 surveyed knew how to prescribe drugs to those infected with TDR TB. "Treatment of TB was relentlessly getting worse until we came out with our paper," says Udwadia.

Dr Udwadia was the only Indian invited by the WHO to be part of the TB ‘Guidelines Group’, which formulated the 4th edition of the TB Guidelines, published in 2010.

He is a sought-after speaker This year, Dr. Udwadia addressed immunology students at Harvard University. Next month, he is to speak at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health meeting in London.

He is on the editorial board of Thorax, one of the world’s leading respiratory medicine journals.

Dr Udwadia has authored more than 140 publications.