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WHO Recommends New Treatment for TB Patients
Patients suffering from tuberculosis (TB) now have an alternative form of treatment with far fewer pills to cure their disease, said the World Health Organization (WHO) Wednesday in a press release.
The new treatment, reducing the number of tablets to as few as three or four per day from up to 16 a day, has recently become cheaper and therefore more accessible even to people in the poorest countries, WHO said.
The proposed treatment replaces individual tablets of the different drugs with fixed-dose combinations tablets (FDCs), which contain up to four different drugs, according to WHO. This solution means hundreds fewer tablets that each patient has to swallow over the whole course of treatment.
"It is important that FDCs become part of government policy in all countries, especially in the 22 TB high-burden countries," said Dr Sergio Spinaci, one of the authors of the WHO article recommending the new treatment.
WHO estimates that there are some eight million new TB cases a year and at least two million TB deaths a year worldwide. Eighty percent of the cases occur in 22 "high-burden" countries, mostly in Asia and Africa.
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