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The human toll taken by tuberculosis (TB) is increasing worldwide, particularly in developing countries with high HIV prevalence. Each year, TB kills nearly two million people while an estimated nine million develop the disease. An additional 450,000 new cases of multidrug resistant (MDR) TB are seen every year, including people diagnosed with XDR-TB, a strain of TB that is resistant to first-line antibiotics as well as to at least two classes of second-line drugs.
But the medicines in today's standard TB treatment were developed in the 1950s and 1960s and the most commonly used TB test was developed more than a century ago and manages to detect TB in only about half of the cases. Existing TB drugs and tests are even less adapted for use in people who also have HIV/AIDS. To respond to the devastating impact of TB, especially in developing countries, newer medicines will urgently need to get to patients by working with regulatory agencies and drug developers to accelerate clinical development and availability of new drugs for compassionate use.
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Tuberculosis: Don't tell us it's under control
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Tuberculosis is still a neglected disease. The existing TB control strategy recommended by the World Health Organization is showing real limitations, and neglects large numbers of patients who are HIV/TB co-infected, who suffer from multi-drug resistant forms of TB, or who are children.
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