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New Cure for TB

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dicey eye

Scientists Discover New Cure for the Deadliest Strain of Tuberculosis

Once, a diagnosis of extensively drug-resistant TB meant quick death. A three-drug regimen cures most patients in just months.

 

  • Aug. 14, 2019

TSAKANE, South Africa — When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds.

Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away — and infested with vervet monkeys.

“I cried the whole way in the ambulance,” Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. “They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die.”

Five years later, Ms. Msimango, 25, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son.

The trial she joined was small — it enrolled only 109 patients — but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration effectively endorsed the approach, approving the newest of the three drugs used in the regimen. Usually, the World Health Organization adopts approvals made by the F.D.A. or its European counterpart, meaning the treatment could soon come into use worldwide.

But in the trial Ms. Msimango joined, nicknamed Nix-TB, patients took only five pills a day for six months.

The pills contain just three drugs: pretomanid, bedaquiline and linezolid. (Someday, the whole regimen might come in just one pill, as H.I.V. drugs do, one expert said.)

Until recently, some advocacy groups opposed pretomanid’s approval, saying the drug needed further testing. But other TB experts argued that the situation is so desperate that risks had to be taken.

Dr. Gerald Friedland, one of the discoverers of XDR-TB and now an emeritus professor at Yale’s medical school, called Nix “a wonderful trial” that could revolutionize treatment: “If this works as well as it seems to, we need to do this now.”

Tuberculosis has now surpassed AIDS as the world’s leading infectious cause of death, and the so-called XDR strain is the ultimate in lethality. It is resistant to all four families of antibiotics typically used to fight the disease.

Excerpts from lengthy New York Times report

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andy

It's good that there is possible headway for the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis.  The problem in the first instance is when screening takes place in a first world clinic, the person diagnosed with the TB will be treated with medication of the norm. Obviously the drugs will not work on the drug-resistant strain, so useless medication, and the person now just deuterates at a rapid rate, and without the right drugs death is a certain outcome for the infected person, also now a carrier of the highly infectious virus. But, at the time I was diagnosed with the TB infection I was treated has many with anti viral medication of it's time. But my condition just worsened with the drugs having no effect. What a time I had! Firstly being accused of not taking the medication by the health authorities, now I was a carrier of the deadly virus, plus the doctor who was treating me, admittedly told me in writing it was now out of his skills of treating, don't misunderstand me this doctor was an expert in overseas disease,  he quickly called in the "number one specialist" of the country who knew more of these diseases. This doctor was actually in his retirement. but never the less he took me on has a patient and treated me. I was 84 Pounds in body weight. It was a difficult time in my life, also in the period of treatment I was confined to my home until I was not a risk of endangering others to the illness, I was treated at home, nurses would visit me three times in the day for injections and pills, I was taking 57 tablets per day, but also two times I was admitted to isolation in hospital with intensive treatment, both times being told 50/50 of surviving the next 24 hours. Five years later I was given the all clear. I apparently may have contracted the illness in India, with the bugs laying dormant for a period of ten years. My sister was not has lucky, not the same strain of TB I had, that would have been reasonable to expect or think off. But no my sister passed away of the cause illness of TB that she was infected by a pigeon.         

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andy
5 hours ago, dicey eye said:

A surprising piece of data.

 

Not to worry about because I read it's not in Cambodia.

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