The World Health Organisation (WHO) has introduced new recommendations for a treatment of Multi Drug Resistance Tuberculosis (MDR-TB).<\/p>\n
With the new regimen, patients will receive treatment for nine months instead of 24 months as has been the case.<\/p>\n
The WHO says the new regimen is a major breakthrough in the fight against TB and has dramatically eased the burden of treatment on patients.<\/p>\n
In a presentation titled: \u201cShortened MDR-TB Regimens: Union Supported Research\u201d, to Citizen News Service <\/em>(CNS) journalist fellows last month, International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease Vice President of Research and Development, ID Rusen, said an estimated 480,000 new cases of MDR-TB occur yearly but only a quarter of these estimated cases are detected and treated.<\/p>\n \u201cOf reported MDR-TB patients, only 50 percent are treated successfully. Currently recommended treatments are lengthy and often difficult to tolerate,\u201d said Rusen.<\/p>\n National Programme Director for Malawi TB Control Programme, James Mpunga said Malawi reports 28 cases of MDR-TB in a year saying this type of TB is an emerging problem for Malawi adding that its prevalence rate is at five percent according to a 2011 survey which his organisation did.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course we are much better as compared to other Sadc countries,\u201d he said, noting that even though Malawi has made strides in reducing cases of TB, the disease is still a major public health problem.<\/p>\n He said next month African countries will meet in Uganda to discuss on how this will be implemented in respective countries looking at finances and capacity building at all levels among other things.<\/p>\n MDR and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB are able to withstand certain antibiotics used in typical TB drug regimens. Resistance can occur for a number of reasons, but generally stems from one person to another, creating potentially devastating scenario for communities. This is potentially true in countries with unstable or developing health care.<\/p>\n Drug resistance is pernicious as more are exposed; an increasingly heavy burden is placed on health care systems and on families and communities that are impacted, according to WHO adding: \u201cCountries around the world, especially those with high burden of TB cases need to move quickly to implement the new regimen by formally incorporating the regimen into their national clinical guidelines.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The World Health Organisation (WHO) has introduced new recommendations for a treatment of Multi Drug Resistance Tuberculosis (MDR-TB). With the new regimen, patients will receive treatment for nine months instead of 24 months as has been the case. The WHO says the new regimen is a major breakthrough in the fight against TB and has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28418,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28413\/revisions\/28418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}