Public healthDrug-resistant TB emerges as a global threat
Drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) has become a global threat,with multidrug resistant TB causing about 500,000 new cases every year. Experts say the problem requires cooperation among governments, pharmaceuticals, and academics to develop effective treatments.
Doctors without Borders (MSF) warns that drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) has become a global threat, requiring cooperation among governments, pharmaceuticals, and academics to develop effective treatments. Dr. Philip Du Cros, a TB advisor for the group, said that MDR-TB, or multidrug resistant TB, is an ever growing problem in many countries, causing roughly 500,000 new cases every year. Dealing with MDR-TB is already a challenge, but a stronger strain of the bacteria that causes XDR-TB, or extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, has emerged.
Voice of America reports that standard TB drugs are often useless against new forms of the disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug resistance occurs when patients do not complete their full course of treatment; when health-care providers prescribe the wrong treatment, the wrong dose, or length of time for taking the drugs; when the supply of drugs is not always available; or when the drugs are of poor quality.
Du Cros said that the solution is a much shorter, more effective treatment. Currently, five to eight drugs are used to treat resistant TB, depending on the regimen needed. The latest TB drugs introduced to the market are the first TB medications developed in forty years. “Although that’s cause for optimism,” he said, “we still don’t know how to use those drugs in new regimens. And so we’re limited by adding them to a regimen that is already highly toxic and difficult for patients to take.”
More urgency and attention are needed to tackle the TB epidemic, Du Cros said. “I think the main reason this has got to be a big problem is that although we’ve made some progress tackling TB, in recent years the global community has turned away from investing in improving on what we can do with TB. We’ve been satisfied with old answers. The reality is that we don’t currently have the answers that will solve the problem of TB. We don’t have actually effective treatments in new regimens that will actually tackle the large epidemic of multidrug-resistant TB.”
When the United States experienced a few hundred cases of multidrug resistant TB in the early 1990s, about $1 billion dollars was invested in a public health program. The global TB epidemic is far greater but needs just as much intense activism from policy makers. MSF notes that “with only one in five people in need receiving treatment, the fatal, airborne disease is left to spread indiscriminately.”
