When a week of events focusing on the worldwide impact of tuberculosis brings together a group to talk about women’s health and diplomacy, it needs to be a broad-based group, and it was. For a start, the talk at the Washington Club in Washington, DC was sponsored by The Center for Global Health and Diplomacy, [...]
In the week leading up to International Tuberculosis Day, which commemorates the discovery by Robert Koch of the cause of the disease in 1882, Science Speaks will look at issues, events and efforts to confront this lasting and global health threat. When South African nurse Pat Bond got sick in 2010, doctors treated her for [...]
“In healthcare we have to work with what’s already happening” Nathan Sigworth was a freshman in college when he spent a month visiting a small hospital in India, and made a simple discovery: economics there dictated a very different delivery of health care than he was used to seeing. In time, he discovered that while [...]
The report released this morning by the Institute Of Medicine portrays a global and growing danger that is both deadly and resource draining, brings the highest risks in the poorest countries, and threatens affluent countries as well. Still, coordinated efforts to tackle the proliferation of fake and substandard medicines lag far behind other efforts to [...]
With no medicine on hand, a father and his infant who have just been diagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis go untreated, the delay prolonging their recoveries as well as the time they will remain infectious. The delay adds to the risk that they will get sicker and resistant to more drugs, increases the odds that those [...]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first new drug to treat tuberculosis in nearly half a century and the agency’s first use of its accelerated approval process to speed availability of TB medicine comes with cautions, and with a direction of work yet to be done, agency officials and treatment advocates agree. [...]
A study following patients who had participated in a trial of a potential new treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis has shown heartening results, with nearly three-quarters of patients who took the medicine for six months or longer showing “favorable outcomes” — cured or completed treatment – according to a study published in the European Respiratory Journal. [...]
About half a century has passed since a new tuberculosis drug was put to use, and in that time the challenges to successful treatment of the disease have only grown, with bacteria adapting faster to conditions that allowed it to flourish than science and funding for research. Morphing into forms that require from months to [...]
New approaches to disease treatment and prevention, as well as failures in old approaches are part of what we’re reading this week . . . NIH-Funded analysis estimates effective PrEP dosing for men who have sex with men: An analysis of data from the iPrEx study looked at the amount of the antiretroviral medicine [...]
As board members of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria prepare to meet Thursday and Friday in Geneva, advocates for tuberculosis detection, treatment and prevention have signed a response to a proposal they say will foster a divisive “disease against disease” approach to funding, and seriously undermine efforts to roll out cost-effective [...]
HIV
The second of two reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewing HIV treatment efforts suppported by the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief concludes that incomplete information on the results of those efforts will interfere with accurately evaluating partner countries’ abilities to sustain treatment programs. The GAO also has produced a report on PEPFAR [...]
Tuberculosis
A group of tuberculosis community activists is taking their quest for representation in responses to TB global, joining efforts across borders to make their voices heard, an announcement this week says. The Global Coalition of TB Activists came together at a February Stop TB Partnership meeting in Geneva, the announcement says, with the aim of [...]
Research & Development
What would people living with HIV do differently if they knew that they could be infected again, with a new strain, that could complicate both their disease, and their treatment?
Policy
What if the government was awarding a contract to fight malaria in a developing country, and an organization bidding for the work had all the technical expertise the work called for, but also a history of criticizing the government? Should that keep the organization from getting the contract? Could one of the strings attached to [...]