It was Christmas come early for publicly funded TB programs and for advocates of improved tuberculosis regimens when the maker of a rifapentine, a drug that can shorten treatment for tuberculosis infection from as much as nine months to three months announced Thursday it will drop its price for the medicine to a dollar a pill.

“We can't fight AIDS unless we do much more to fight TB as well.”

Bipartisan, bicameral legislation extends U.S. Leadership Act, confirming ongoing commitments to PEPFAR and the Global Fund as well as to bilateral responses to AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

Dr. Edward Nardell of Harvard Medical School was sitting in his office one day when a student called to ask if he had any advice on how to avoid contracting drug-resistant tuberculosis.

A little more than four months ago, a collection of organizations and individuals concerned with the high price of rifapentine, a drug that could treat tuberculosis more quickly than other drugs, and also treat TB infection before it caused illness, wrote to Sanofi, the company that makes medicine. Noting that government funding that had made the product possible, the letter writers urged the company to lower the drug’s price.

Through the summer, talk circulated that Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby was preparing to move on – and today we’re hearing that his departure date is set for as early as Oct. 26.

How long is the lag before the new becomes the norm? In the midst of evolving guidelines based on evidence surrounding the treatment of HIV and TB co-infection, the answer can be a matter of life and preventable death. And in resource poor settings, where changes to treatment can face more challenges, and where physicians have less access to professional conferences where data is presented that points to the need to change practices, adjusting treatment to evidence and guidelines has been assumed to take longer, noted authors of a recently released study in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The study, Changes in the timing of antiretroviral therapy initiation in HIV-infected patients with tuberculosis in Uganda: a study of the diffusion of evidence into practice in the global response to HIV/AIDS found that putting guidelines into practice in resource poor settings doesn’t have to take longer in resource-poor settings than in resource-rich settings.

“It is well understood,” this paper from Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership begins, “that patent protection increases the price of medicines and thereby decreases access to them.”

With tuberculosis both the most common opportunistic illness and leading cause of death for people living with HIV, the connection between the two diseases has been documented and observed. What has been less documented is the impact of increased HIV responses on tuberculosis rates in countries hard hit by both epidemics.

Momentum toward gathering an effective arsenal of treatment for tuberculosis may have gathered speed in recent years, the 2013 Pipeline Report jointly released by the Treatment Action Group and HIV i-base in June pointed out, yet it falls far short of people sick and infected with TB worldwide need now.