A five-month-old girl in Mumbai suffers from a rare disease and is surprised to hear of her treatment. A five-month-old baby girl is being treated at a Mumbai suburban hospital where she is battling life and death on a ventilator. Tera Kamath is fighting a debilitating disease called SMA Type 1. To recover from this disease, the girl has to pay Rs 16 crore.
According to media reports, effective vaccines for treating the disease are coming from the US. The price of this injection is said to be Rs 16 crore. Too much of Kamat’s parents are not capable enough to get such expensive injections. For this, they resorted to crowdsourcing. By making a page on social media, Teera’s parents raised Rs 10 crore through crowdsourcing by January 14. But it still wasn’t enough.
The biggest issue in the treatment of the girl child was the tax of about Rs 6.5 crore. However, with the intervention of BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis, the Modi government has waived all taxes on vaccines (23 per cent import duty and 12 per cent GST), which is worth about Rs 6.5 crore. In fact, Devendra Fadnavis had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi shortly after the matter came to light and requested the exemption of all taxes on this injection from the US.
With this step of the Modi government and the help of the people, the baby is now on the path to extreme treatment. The injections will soon be ordered by the US. It is being said that the baby will be treated using gene therapy. The surgery performed on her brings back the same gene that was missing at her birth. According to the baby’s parents, she was healthy from birth, but gradually her health began to deteriorate later.
Spinal muscular atrophy is a rare disease of type-1. Children suffering from spinal muscular atrophy type-1 have weak muscles, lack of water in the body and difficulty in breastfeeding and breathing. In this disease, the child becomes completely inactive.
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