Researchers have significantly strengthened the safety profile of a watershed treatment course for highly drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis — a heartening breakthrough set to change the lives of millions of MDR-TB patients around the world. The results of a randomized-controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine today showed the new oral TB […] Continue reading ->
The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent diversion of resources toward battling SARS-CoV2 has also set back global efforts to eliminate the world’s second most deadly infectious killer: Tuberculosis, by 2030.  Only a doubling of investments next year can pave the way to attainment of the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to eliminate the disease, […] Continue reading ->
Tuberculosis care is quintessentially colonial, even in 2021. While many countries have been emancipated from their colonizers, the heritage of the colonial mindset, culture and even entire economies is deeply embedded within high burden TB countries in the post-colonial era.   A disease of poverty, TB has historically been terribly neglected. Although the number one infectious […] Continue reading ->
In just one year, COVID-19 has undone more than a decade’s progress in the fight against tuberculosis (TB), health experts said on Thursday. While COVID-19 fatality numbers are decreasing worldwide, TB-related deaths remain steady at 4000 cases a day – an occurrence experts partly attribute to limited access to TB treatment services during COVID lockdown […] Continue reading ->
The COVID-19 pandemic will end at some point. But TB, tobacco use, air pollution and other lung diseases will continue to “steal the breath and life of millions of people every year”, unless we reimagine the future, said WHO’s director-general Dr Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus, appearing at the opening of the 51st Union World Conference On […] Continue reading ->
Amidst the battle against a new infectious threat, the fight against tuberculosis, one of humankind’s oldest recorded infectious diseases, is also progressing. Pretomanid – only the second TB drug to hit the market in over two decades – received conditional marketing approval Monday from the European Commission as part of a new, three-drug treatment regimen […] Continue reading ->