Over the last century, Europe – including Northern, Western, Southern and Central European countries – made remarkable progress in the near elimination of tuberculosis (TB) due to improved socio-economic conditions and advancements in research and development. However, a recent surge of TB in Europe, coupled with lack of structural preparedness within many European Union (EU) […] Continue reading ->
The elimination of tuberculosis cannot be achieved if medicines are locked in a “patent panoply,” according to Indian author and journalist Vidya Kishnan. Speaking to Garry Aslanyan on the most recent episode of Dialogues, a new series from the Global Health Matters podcast, the author of “Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History” said that “everything […] Continue reading ->
Clinical trial results presented at the Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris on Wednesday provided evidence to support the use of four new, improved regimens to treat multi-drug resistant tuberculosis or rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (MDR/RR-TB). The endTB clinical trial found three new drug regimens that can deliver similar efficacy and safety to conventional treatments […] Continue reading ->
A massive 7.5 million people were diagnosed with tuberculosis in 2022, the highest number ever – but this is positive as it indicates that countries’ ability to detect the disease is recovering after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) 2023 Global tuberculosis (TB) report. The two countries that contributed most to […] Continue reading ->
BERLIN – The health and humanitarian crisis triggered by Hamas attacks on Israeli towns and villages a week ago took center stage at the opening of the World Health Summit (WHS) on Sunday evening, drawing sharp remarks by German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach who denounced the “barbaric” Hamas attacks, 7 October, which led to the […] Continue reading ->
An emotional Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), revealed that her father had died of tuberculosis (TB) as she thanked advocates for their work to secure the adoption of the UN political declaration on TB at the high-level meeting (HLM) on Friday. Urging UN member states to devote the necessary resources to […] Continue reading ->
Leading global health experts and activists have expressed frustration and disappointment at the draft political declarations on pandemics, universal health coverage (UHC) and tuberculosis that world leaders are expected to adopt at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) next week. Key criticisms of the three declarations are that they offer no advancement on previous international […] Continue reading ->
High cost has prevented some cancer drugs from being included in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) updated Essential Medicines List (EML) and Essential Medicines for List Children (EMLc) released on Wednesday. These include “patented, highly-priced” treatments for lung and breast cancer. “With the cancer medicines, we are facing now an issue where we have a […] Continue reading ->
The licensing agreement reached between Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and the Stop TB Partnership on Thursday to allow the generic production of the tuberculosis drug, bedaquiline, is simply a “stop-gap” measure that applies to a limited number of countries, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). At least nine countries in the Eastern Europe and Central […] Continue reading ->
Karabo Rafube was born to a single mother in 1982 in Soweto, a sprawling township south of Johannesburg, South Africa. His mother abandoned him three months later, and Rafube was taken to live with his father. In the final years of apartheid, Soweto was a harsh place to grow up. His father already had an […] Continue reading ->