Scientists Discover a Cure For the Deadliest Strain of Tuberculosis 26
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds. Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away -- and infested with vervet monkeys.
"I cried the whole way in the ambulance," Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. "They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die." Five years later, Ms. Msimango, 25, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son.
The trial she joined was small -- it enrolled only 109 patients -- but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration effectively endorsed the approach, approving the newest of the three drugs used in the regimen. Usually, the World Health Organization adopts approvals made by the F.D.A. or its European counterpart, meaning the treatment could soon come into use worldwide. Typically, patients in South Africa treated with this deadly strain of tuberculosis are required to take up to 40 daily pills for up to two years. "But in the trial Ms. Msimango joined, nicknamed Nix-TB, patients took only five pills a day for six months," the report says. "The pills contain just three drugs: pretomanid, bedaquiline and linezolid. Someday, the whole regimen might come in just one pill, as H.I.V. drugs do, one expert said."
The trial she joined was small -- it enrolled only 109 patients -- but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration effectively endorsed the approach, approving the newest of the three drugs used in the regimen. Usually, the World Health Organization adopts approvals made by the F.D.A. or its European counterpart, meaning the treatment could soon come into use worldwide. Typically, patients in South Africa treated with this deadly strain of tuberculosis are required to take up to 40 daily pills for up to two years. "But in the trial Ms. Msimango joined, nicknamed Nix-TB, patients took only five pills a day for six months," the report says. "The pills contain just three drugs: pretomanid, bedaquiline and linezolid. Someday, the whole regimen might come in just one pill, as H.I.V. drugs do, one expert said."
Re:Joe Biden (Score:4, Funny)
I am not sure what this is about, but it appears you have tapped into Joe "Mad Groper" Biden's stream of consciousness.
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I am not sure what this is about, but it appears you have tapped into Joe "Mad Groper" Biden's stream of consciousness.
Speaking of "Mad Gropers", did you hear our current President like to grab women by the pussy?
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I am not sure what this is about, but it appears you have tapped into Joe "Mad Groper" Biden's stream of consciousness.
Speaking of "Mad Gropers", did you hear our current President like to grab women by the pussy?
When he's not skiving off playing golf or rambling to a tv person like your demented grandad that is.
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So a former AC went ahead and got an account.
Long drug courses (Score:5, Informative)
The lay person might wonder why there are such long courses of drugs given for TB, unlike for most antibiotic treatments.
The reason is that TB forms small nodules, cysts if you will, that are one of the body's methods for isolating an invader. Systemically-delivered drugs do not penetrate into these nodules very well. Thus, long courses of antibiotics are necessary to kill ALL of the bacteria.
Bonus fact: because appropriate courses of anti-TB drugs like isoniazid are so long, compliance is poor, and drug resistant strains are the result. What the world needs is a drug that will penetrate TB nodules, so that the standard treatment is only a week or two long instead of many months.
Bonus fact 2: pulmonary TB nodules are often initially mis-diagnosed as metastatic cancer appearing in the lungs.
Look into phage therapy... (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Phage therapy or viral phage therapy is the therapeutic use of bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections. Phage therapy has many potential applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science, and agriculture. "
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories... [scoop.co.nz]
"While there are some genuine reasons why phage treatments of bacterial diseases were overlooked in the 1930s and 1940s, the failure to develop a western research program into bacteriophage treatment in the 1980s and 1990s represents an inexcusable failure of western capitalism. By the 1980s, ther e could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going to be a major problem in (if not before) the twentyfirst century. Yet, we just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made in communist Georgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union. It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?"
https://www.phagetherapycenter... [phagetherapycenter.com]
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> It's been said that bacteriophage treatments can't be mass-produced and packaged in pill form.
I'm on my second 30-day course of gut bacteriophage treatment. Weirdest-looking pills you've ever seen.
https://www.lifeextension.com/... [lifeextension.com]
Fair warning: the day of the maximum die-off is very uncomfortable. After that is passed the rest of the course is preventing regrowth and not uncomfortable. Double up with caprylic acid to permeate the biofilms.
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Life Extension is a high quality organization. LE's products are first class, and their profits go to funding medical research.
On the down side, in my opinion they get suckered occasionally, so you do have to use your judgement.
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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Good luck i guess.
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https://archive.org/details/BB... [archive.org]
One of the reasons cited for not developing this in the West is that since phages are naturally occurring organisms you can't patent them.
If memory serves phage treatment was adopted in the US but only for livestock.
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There is also a significant issue of strain specificity. For example, a phage effective against E.coli O157:H7 may be ineffective against E.coli K-12. Much of which is probably a hangover from the development of bacterial identification via staining (does a culture absorb Grams stain? If yes, are the bacteria rod-, sphere- or comma- shaped? And proceed down a key of tests which a hospital lab could do over a matter of several hours to get
TB drug resistance is because.... (Score:5, Interesting)
TB is drug resistant because people stop taking the drugs when they start to feel better which gives the bug a leg up to evolution of the bug in developing resistance. Often months before the end of treatment patients stop taking the drugs. This is often exacerbated by the fact that most of the infected are homeless or drug users or both and on state supported care and once they feel better they want to get out of hospital and back on drugs.
A 6 month long course of pills guarantee's that the same thing is going to happen. They need to develop an implant like drug delivery system for TB to prevent this or TB will be resistant to this 3 drug cocktail in no time at all.
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Same story, different disease, different drugs :
I used to work with a Croatian (Serbian? Bosnian? I forget which. That area.) in Tanzania. We'd both seen people with cerebral malarial fits back in Europe and were similarly motivated to avoid the disease. He couldn't get the same anti-malarials that I brought with me from the UK (Malarone) ; he could only get Lariam in his country. He'd used that before for another employer and he found he was one of the 10
How can this happen? (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Are you being sarcastic of just cannot read. This took place in South Africa, without either the U.S.'s FDA or its equivalent European counterpart being part of the testing? That was right in the summary, did you not get beyond the headline?
In one of the articles linked to the story there is this quote:
Pretomanid is not owned by a drug company but by the TB Alliance, a nonprofit based in New York that is seeking new treatments.
A nonprofit, Big Pharma?
Disease or cure (Score:2)
Typically, patients in South Africa treated with this deadly strain of tuberculosis are required to take up to 40 daily pills for up to two years.
as with the hepititis (Score:2)
as with the hepatitis cure, it will be too expensive for insurance companies to cover and one that only the rich could afford.
TB's a bastard (Score:2)
About every 5 years I get a notification that I've lived and worked on a site with someone who subsequently expressed TB (at least once it was a South African, but the other events I couldn't finger a particular individual), and a request to come into my doctor for a consultation. At which point the conversation goes "Yes, I was positive for BCG at school. Then I worked with TB-infected material as a student and was X-rayed