Anamika found herself asking this after a close family friend advised her not to tell anybody in her office about her tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis, except for HR and her immediate manager.

This is when it hit her like a brick. The 26-year-old embarrassingly admits that until now, even she had thought of TB as a deadly disease that only infected the “poor or unhygienic ones” in colonial times.

And now that she had been diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis herself, a truck of emotions hit her. Fear, guilt, embarrassment, helplessness – all that on top of chilling fevers, extreme lethargy, constant coughing and avalanche-like weight loss.

“Is it something shameful? Do I need to hide it from people? Are they going to start treating me differently just because I caught a disease that was beyond my control?” the young professional thought on a loop.

DISCLAIMER: This article is based on information from the public domain and/or the experts we spoke to.…