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PARIS (AFP) – A new treatment for a deadly drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis can cure more than 90 per cent of sufferers, according to a landmark clinical trial whose results were revealed exclusively to AFP.
Doctors in Belarus – a country with one of the world's highest rates of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis – treated 181 patients with the new drug, bedaquiline, in combination with other antibiotics.
Of these, 168 – 93 per cent – were cured, compared to just over half of people treated with existing drugs, according to the study results.
The United States, Africa, and Southeast Asia, according to AFP beforehand.
"The results of this study are likely to be highly resistant to tuberculosis," Paula Fujiwara, scientific director of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease commented on the findings.
She was not involved in the research.
Tuberculosis killed at least 1.7 million people in 2017, according to the World Health Organization, making the airborne infection of the world's deadliest infectious disease.
It's a little bit of malaria every year.
Despite the huge death toll, tuberculosis has been fairly low in the global research funding that goes to HIV / Aids.
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is one of the most commonly used drugs.
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