There is a wide spread prejudice among the staff of health centres that patients invariably prefer injection and it was felt by many health workers that streptomycin containing intermittent regimens would be more acceptable to rural patients. A study was carried out to find out the acceptability and applicability of an intermittent supervised drug regimen containing streptomycin 1 gm and INH 650 mgm once a week in a rural area as well as the regularity with which the rural folk took this treatment. Association between the observed regularity and factors like age, sex etc., was also analysed. 107 rural patients of tuberculosis, diagnosed at 5 taluk hospitals in Ananthapur district of Andhra Pradesh on the basis of sputum examination by direct smear and/or X-ray examination with the help of mobile X-rays, consented to treatment with intermittent regimen mentioned above. About half of them were new patients and the rest were old patients who were mostly regular on an earlier oral regimen. 94 of the above were available for analysis.

The regimen was found quite practicable in the sense that at no centre the study was interrupted or discontinued because of the inability of the health centre staff to give injection. If regularity is expressed as a proportion of patients who at any given time had taken the optimal amount of treatment (no. of injections), then 40 patients (42%) were found regular on the intermittent regimen, 36 patients were classified as lost and the remaining had 3 or less injections due and had not yet had the chance to become lost according to the definition adopted. Thus, the regularity of those accepting the regimen was quite low. There was very steep fall in regularity during the first 10 weeks of treatment, nearly a half of the total cases became irregular during the first 6 weeks. Beyond 4 months of treatment, patients who continued to attend centres regularly for treatment became negligible, thus pointing that injection was not a key variable in the treatment regularity of tuberculosis.