Nearly two months after the Health Ministry set a highly ambitious target of working towards elimination of tuberculosis by 2025, a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases indicates that India’s TB crisis is all set to snowball by 2040 when one in 10 cases could be drug-resistant. What is even more alarming is that the increased... Continue Reading →
Working towards personalised TB treatment
Three major global research centres in India will receive funding coming out of collaboration between the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department for Biotechnology (DBT), India. The Department for Biotechnology will match the funding provided by UK through MRC and Newton Fund. The Chennai-based National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT) will get... Continue Reading →
Editorial: An ominous situation
That the medicine chest is bereft of effective new drugs to fight the extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) strain has once again become frighteningly clear. According to a study published recently in The Lancet, while only 16 per cent (17 of the 107) of a South African patient cohort had either treatment cure or completion at... Continue Reading →
‘Long-term outcomes in South African patients with XDR-TB poor’
Long-term outcomes in South African patients who have extremely-drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) are “poor” immaterial of HIV status, notes a paper published on January 17 in The Lancet . Despite treatment outcomes being poor, “substantial number” of XDR-TB patients who were still infected were discharged from hospitals in spite of failing treatment. With the median... Continue Reading →
TB: ‘There is a clearly higher risk of mortality in children of 0-4 years’
With 8.6 million people across the world developing tuberculosis in 2012 and nearly 1.3 million succumbing to the disease, and with the number of people with multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extremely-drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) increasing every year, the focus has been on increasing case-detection and improving treatment rates. In the process, no significant measures... Continue Reading →
Editorial: No time to lose
Published in The Hindu on march 20, 2008 If globally containing tuberculosis, the incidence of which is estimated to be growing at one per cent a year, is proving to be a big challenge, the spread of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) — caused by a bacterial strain that is resistant to at least two of... Continue Reading →
Editorial: A warning signal
Published in the Hindu on October 12, 2006 The discovery of a highly virulent strain — extremely drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB)--in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, and presented last month at the XVI international AIDS conference in Toronto, has dramatically changed our perception of the way tuberculosis can create havoc for humanity. According to the... Continue Reading →
Extremely drug-resistant TB emerges
Published in The Hindu on September 28, 2006 "Drug-resistant TB has frequently been encountered in India and its presence has been known virtually from the time anti-TB drugs were introduced for the treatment of TB," notes the `TB India 2006' report of the Ministry of Health and Family Affairs. Though data on the drug resistance... Continue Reading →
