"Given the evidence base available to us currently, can we claim pretomanid a victory? We think more research is needed before pretomanid can be celebrated as a promising treatment for people with tuberculosis."

India's health ministry wanted to distribute a life saving TB drug only to patients in big cities. A girl from Patna fought the government and won, but it was too late for her.

Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg have shown us the formidable power of a single adolescent girl with determination. Shreya Tripathi of India, who didn’t live to see her 20th birthday, belongs with Malala and Greta in the pantheon of teenagers whose unswerving principles have brought the powerful to their knees.

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.

Marking those who remain sick with the word “failure” implies that they themselves, rather than the disease, are to blame.

Fatima and Asa, two women in their early thirties, might never have met if life had been more kind to them both. Asa was finishing nursing school while living a middle-class life with her husband and three young children in a two-story home in the capital city. Fatima was a mother of five who grew up in deep poverty and was still struggling for survival in a one-room shack on the outskirts of town.  

The growing crisis of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is so serious that tuberculosis specialists have called it a “time bomb”,¹ and multiple deadly explosions have already been reported globally.² On Daru Island in Papua New Guinea, an unprecedented outbreak of MDR-TB is occurring.³

In the remote mountains of South Africa, Matsepo rises at 3 am to start the day. She has important work to do, work which is a matter of life or death. Such an early start is necessary for her to wash, get dressed, and prepare tea before waking her feverish, emaciated 5 year-old granddaughter Ntabaleng. She hoists the fairy-light girl onto her back to begin the four-hour walk to the nearest clinic. Ntabaleng’s own mother cannot do this because she is dead, a victim of the same drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) that is responsible for Matsepo’s daily journey with her precious granddaughter. Ntabaleng must go to the clinic for treatment because she has to receive a daily injection as part of her DR-TB therapy. Although it’s usually difficult for her to even muster the energy to lift her head, she wails as soon as the needle pierces her raw buttocks. “Make it stop grandma,” she sobs, “make it stop.”

The World Health Organization just released new data showing tuberculosis kills more people than even HIV/AIDS, and it called multidrug-resistant TB a public health crisis.

In the “Implementation Innovations” webinar series from USAID and SIAPS,  Dr. Jennifer Furin and Dr. Gunta Dravniece presented on October 13, 2015 about new TB drug delamanid. This webinar provided up-to-date information on the use of delamanid for treatment of patients under program conditions. This webinar may be of special interest to consultants, program managers, and clinicians working in the field of drug-resistant TB.