October 1, 2019 – Good News for TB

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Anchor lead: Hope is here for cure of drug resistant tuberculosis, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Pretomanid is the name of a drug recently approved by the FDA for drug resistant tuberculosis, or TB, the type of infection that caused panic among airline passengers recently when it was revealed that someone with the bug was aboard. While that is the stuff of urban legend, Richard Chaisson, a TB expert at Johns Hopkins, says for millions of people worldwide, this has the potential to be a lifesaver.

Chaisson: This is a huge development. Take a disease with about 80% mortality and cure 90% in six months. It’s given as individual drugs. I suspect that in the future that the efforts to combine the drugs together to make it even easier to take, but it’s pretty easy to take compared to the alternative types of treatments which included painful injections, pills that made you psychotic, pills that made you throw up, pills that made you go deaf. In comparison it’s pretty benign.   :31

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.