Anti-TB drug resistance threatens to unwind the progress
There is no doubt that groundbreaking progress has been made in fight against tuberculosis (TB) in the past two decades, but it might be prudent to review if we are winning the fight in order to #endTB by 2030. Do we slip backwards when we fail to prevent every single transmission of new TB infection or when a new person becomes resistant to anti-TB drugs? Are we sliding farther away from our #endTB goalpost, when we fail to ensure early diagnosis, effective treatment and successful cure?
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the newly elected Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) had said to AMR Times last month, “Continuing to scale up treatment for HIV and TB – and addressing the growing rates of resistance – should be high on the agenda of our efforts in combating AMR [anti-microbial resistance]. We have made tremendous gains on these diseases in the past few decades, and I’m gravely concerned that resistance will start to unwind that progress. In 2015, for example, the WHO estimated that there were more than half a million new cases of drug-resistant TB cases that require treatment but only 20% of them were treated. Even those treated they have about 50% treatment success rate. We cannot underestimate this crisis and we must do better to identify, track and manage these drug-resistant TB cases as part of our AMR efforts.”
