Earlier this week, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced two new drugs effective against multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) must be introduced to improve treatment regimens in countries with a high burden of the devastating disease.
The organization indicates that after close to five decades of insufficient research and development into TB, the new medicines—bedaquiline and delamanid—have recently been or are about to be approved.
Research is urgently required to determine the best way to use these new drugs so that treatment can be made shorter and more effective, and provided to the growing number of people with MDR-TB. If measures to tackle MDR-TB are not immediately expanded, rates of the disease will continue to increase worldwide, and a historic opportunity to improve abysmal cure rates will have been squandered, MSF warned.
“We have been waiting for half a century for new drugs that are effective against tuberculosis,” said Dr. Erkin Chinasylova, TB doctor for MSF in Swaziland. “Must we wait another 50 years to seize this historic opportunity to improve and roll out treatment for drug-resistant TB? Getting better treatment is beyond urgent, but we are not seeing anything like the level of prioritization required to make this a reality.”
People on MDR-TB treatment and their caregivers from around the world outline their demands in the “Test Me, Treat Me” manifesto, and urge others to join their call for urgent action.
