Treating Drug-Resistant and non Drug resistant Tuberculosis
This piece originally aired on NPR in June 2013. Awareness of the issue of drug resistance to standard treatments of infectious disease is growing, more because it is affecting the lives of more people than of breakthroughs in the search for solutions. This is a good example where when research for new drug development is strictly market driven, it stalls until profitability for the corporation is assured. Good evidence affirming the aphorism, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained…” The biggest technological advances typically occur when a threat perceived by a nation is met with war-like, ideological collaboration, rather than in an environment of choosing a safe investments.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/09/200387607/what-it-takes-to-cure-drug-resistant-tuberculosis
What It Takes To Cure Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis
| Tuberculosis | Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis | |
|---|---|---|
| Treatment | 2 months with 4 drugs  Followed by 4 months with 2 drugs |
8 months with 5 drugs and a shot  Followed by at least 20 months with 5 drugs |
| Total drugs consumed | 854 pills swallowed | 13,664 pills swallowed, 244 shots taken |
| Drug cost | $20 | $2,500 to $3,000 |
| Possible side effects | Rashes, nausea, liver failure | Permanent hearing loss, permanent dizziness, kidney damage, psychosis, liver failure, nausea, rashes |
| Side effect rates | 5 to 10 percent have mild to serious side effects | At least 33 percent of patients have serious side effects |
We recently chatted with , the president of TB Alliance, and he answered five common questions about tuberculosis. We edited his responses for length and clarity.
- How contagious is TB? Can you get it by being near someone when they sneeze? Probably not. TB requires relatively close contact for transmission. You really need to be around somebody for a good amount of time. That’s why it spreads in .
- An one-third of the world has TB. How could that be? Not everybody who is infected with the TB bacteria gets sick. In many cases, the body walls off the microbes, usually in the lungs, and you never know they’re there, kind of like the bacteria in your mouth or nose.
- Does the TB bacteria always break out of this friendly relationship and make you sick? A person has about a 10 percent chance during their lifetime for a latent TB infection to become an active one and cause problems. That risk increases if your immune system is compromised.
- If you test positive for TB with a , do you always need treatment, even when you’re not sick? Yes. In the U.S., people with latent TB infections traditionally take two antibiotics for six to nine months.
- What’s the difference between regular TB and in terms of treatment? Regular TB takes about six to nine months to cure, with four antibiotics daily. Drug-resistant TB takes about two years to cure, and the treatment is much rougher. The drugs are more toxic, and only about 50 percent of people recover. That rate may be a little higher in the U.S.
