The situation remains critical: tuberculosis continues to spread across the globe and the disease is difficult to treat. Today - Wednesday 24 March -  is World Tuberculosis Day and those who fight TB are calling attention to new ways to treat the airborne disease. They hope a new medicine to fight TB will become available next year.
 
According to the Executive Director of the Dutch KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, Peter Gondrie: "The last means of treating tuberculosis was discovered in 1958, which is a long time ago." However, he expects a new drug to treat TB will become available next year and that this will deal with many current problems.
 
Too little interest
Dr Gondrie admits it is strange that a new medicine did not become available at an earlier stage. "There are still more than nine million new patients every year and 1.8 million deaths. However, there was too little interest and the pharmaceutical industry had little to gain by investing in new tuberculosis drugs.

Around 2000, the newly created Stop TB Partnership reached an agreement with the pharmaceutical industry which ensured that the development of new anti-TB drugs would also be profitable to the industry."
 
One of largest infectious killers
TB, HIV/AIDS and malaria are the world's biggest infectious killers. Tuberculosis occurs mostly in countries and regions with poor health care systems. The disease can be transmitted via bacteria from someone nearby coughing. TB is the most common cause of death among people infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.
 
At the moment, tuberculosis patients have to undergo treatment with various drugs for at least six months. It is expensive and inconvenient.
 
"Unfortunately, in many countries patients do not always follow the treatment regimen - a combination of four drugs, and later two. Also, the quality of the drugs is not optimal in a number of countries. It also takes a lot of effort on the patent's part to follow the regimen and counselling. These are three factors which have contributed to the resistance of the TB bacteria to the drugs which we currently use."
 
The resistant TB bacteria can only be fought with special antibiotics, which means the cost for the entire treatment can reach nearly four thousand euros and take over 18 months. Only 75 percent of the patients recover fully. However, the cost of treating the non-resistant bacteria is just 20 euros and at least 86 percent of patients in such cases are cured. The figure rises to more than 90 percent when more effective drugs are prescribed.
 
The Stop TB Partnership is researching various drugs in cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry. Dr Gondrie describes the developments as "very promising" and says:

"We hope that this [new drug] can start being prescribed in 2011. It's now in the last stages, with large-scale patient trials underway. The drugs that will be marketed in the coming years are effective against the strains of TB which are still sensitive to the regular drugs as well as the drug-resistant bacteria."