Posted on 07/24/2012 2:58:56 PM PDT by neverdem
Combination therapy is just one emerging weapon in the fight against tuberculosis.
AIDS is infamous for its rampant rise in Africa. Yet the biggest killer of Africa’s HIV-positive population — tuberculosis (TB) — has a much lower profile. Its reach is global: it has appeared in pernicious new drug-resistant forms among addicts, prisoners and impoverished people worldwide. In the face of this deadly march, however, medicine has made little apparent progress.
That is now set to change. Earlier this year, two companies filed for regulatory approval for drugs that should enhance existing TB therapies, and at the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington DC, researchers unveiled a combination therapy that could cut the time taken to treat drug-resistant TB from two years to just four months.
“The field of TB drug discovery is the most exciting it’s been in 50 years,” says William Bishai, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV in Durban, South Africa, which is slated to open in October. “I’m very impressed by the combination therapies in development because they’ll give clinicians a roadmap on how to best partner drugs to prevent resistance.”
The progress is being driven by an infusion of government and donor money. And it is being helped by a 2010 change in guidance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which makes it easier for developers to gain approval for novel drug combinations.
Drug cocktails are a key weapon against TB because Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes the disease, quickly evolves resistance to individual drugs, says Melvin Spigelman, president of the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance), a public–private partnership in New York City that sponsored the study on the latest combination therapy.
Spigelman’s group wants to speed the development of such treatments...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
FReepmail me if you want on or off my combined microbiology/immunology ping list.
Had Atypical TB 50 years ago. Was locked in a ward for almost a year before they figured out it wasn’t contagious. Lost everything I owned, and took meds for two years+ Very unpleasant experience.
Yikes! I was sorry to read that.
“Its reach is global: it has appeared in pernicious new drug-resistant forms among addicts, prisoners and impoverished people worldwide.”
Curious - and instructive - how they carefully skirt around the mention of male homosexuals.
Even you should have noticed that NO one has EVER died from an HIV infection. They 'supposedly' succumb to one more than 27 different and disparate diseases, the inference being that the harmless and ubiquitous HIV retrovirus has suppressed the immune system and therefor the 'victims' die of TB or other disease states.
African 'AIDs' is not caused by HIV. It is actually a 'Wasting' disease quite common through out equatorial Africa due to hunger, malnutrition, contaminated water, ineffective waste disposal, poor health care, and insidious insects and water-borne disease vectors carrying a wide variety of potentially lethal killers.
Posting articles like this screed is tantamount to treason against the United States. Obviously you have been co-opted by the homosexual agenda and leftist propaganda regarding HIV and AIDs. Very sad.
Have you seen Medscape’s “Kill the infection, prevent the cancer?”
http://mp.medscape.com/cgi-bin1/DM/x/hDroU0Hpidu0frr0MdZs0E6&uac=82851CG
Hulda Clark just might be looking down smiling...
The subject was new antiTB combos.
Do you have any links to peer reviewed references that nobody is doing any standard HIV screening and confirming with Western Blots, no CD4 counts, or viral loads. That they are just making presumptive diagnoses and giving therapeutic trials of HAART to just about anyone who looks sick, not just pregnant mothers who turned up about to deliver?
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