This is a story about how science can fuel hope to drive away despair.
- By JAKE MILLER
It's about an ambitious project that, over the past decade, has brought new, patient-friendly treatments to some of the places hardest hit by the deadly global epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB).
It's about how the project, called endTB, has improved tuberculosis care through a series of scientific studies while pushing the boundaries of what's thought possible: in clinical trials, in epidemiology, and in the thinking about where you can do the science required to deliver world-class health care where it's needed most.
Patients who have participated in these studies told doctors and researchers that when they received their TB diagnosis, they were afraid.
They spoke of having recently lost family members to the disease, of the terrible prospect of being isolated from their children for a two-year treatment plan that might not work, of being unable to care for their families, earn a living, or pursue their studies because of the rigors of the disease and of the readily available treatments.
And they spoke of how those fears turned to hope when they learned that there were new, alternative treatments available thanks to endTB, with fewer pills to take and no painful injections.
Even with a cure for TB available, the crisis continues
"TB is one of our oldest and deadliest infectious foes," said Carole Mitnick, professor of global health and social medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, research director of endTB, and co-principal investigator of its two clinical trials.
Each year approximately 500,000 new cases occur worldwide of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) - a form of TB that is resistant to rifampicin (also known as rifampin), one of the most important frontline drugs for curing TB.
Although effective treatments for MDR-TB do exist, over the past five years, fewer than 31 percent of people diagnosed with the disease received any treatment. Fewer than 15 percent of those who fell sick were cured.
