Tuberculosis, tecnologías biomédicas y cuidado

Despite the availability of biomedical tools for the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, the disease persists as a global public health problem and is unevenly distributed across contexts marked by poverty and precarity. Since the declaration of a “global emergency” in 1993, control strategies have privileged technologically centered approaches, organizing interventions around the problem of adherence and standardized metrics of therapeutic success. This article proposes an ethnographic approach to tuberculosis treatments based on ongoing research at Casa Masantonio, a community center located in the southern area of the city of Buenos Aires. Through the analysis of practices such as directly acompanied treatment, plancitos, and the itinerary of a patient with drug-resistant tuberculosis, we show that central technical categories—adherence, eligibility, and success—are configured as relational effects of situated care practices. From this perspective, cure emerges as a fragile and ongoing achievement, produced within local assemblages that articulate biomedical technologies, relationships, temporalities, and affects.

Control (management) · Declaration · Ethnography · Poverty · Psychological intervention · Public health · Public policy · Situated · Development, Ethics, and Society · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk · Public Health and Social Inequalities