Tuberculosis innovations mean little if they cannot save lives
In a paper published in eLife, Madhukar Pai and Jennifer Furin summarized the uptake of new TB tools such as GeneXpert, bedaquiline and delamanid, and identified the main barriers to scale-up and patient access.
Abstract
The past decade has seen the emergence of new diagnostics and drugs for tuberculosis, a disease that kills over 1.8 million people each year. However, these new tools are yet to reach scale, and access remains a major challenge for patients in low and middle income countries. Urgent action is needed if we are committed to ending the TB epidemic. This means raising the level of ambition, embracing innovation, increasing financial investments, addressing implementation gaps, and ensuring that new technologies reach those who need them to survive. Otherwise, the promise of innovative technologies will never be realized.
An accompanying blog post published in HuffPost Canada can be accessed here.
