Scientists Have Found A 100% Cure For Deadly Tuberculosis, And It Can Save Lakhs Every Year

Tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of disease-related death worldwide. In 2017, 10 million people contracted it and 1.6 million died from the disease.

It's also curable, but that involves timely diagnosis and treatment with the right drugs.

Images courtesy: Reuters

Active, drug-susceptible TB is treated with a standard course of four antimicrobial drugs over six months. But without the right kind of support, the disease can worsen, become resistant to drugs, and even spread to others.

That's why doctors have been running medical trials in Johannesburg, attempting to treat the deadliest strain of TB, known as XDR. They only ever took in 109 patients, around five years ago. But since then, their treatment has shown a 90 percent success rate against drug resistant version of the disease.

That treatment has just been approved by the FDA, meaning organisations like WHO are likely to adopt it soon. It's pathbreaking, because the XDR tuberculosis has previously shown to be resistant to all four families of antibiotics typically used.

Only a tiny fraction of TB patients around the world contract XDR, but it has the highest kill rate.

Most die before they can even be diagnosed, experts say. And of the few that receive the usual treatment, the survival rate is just 34 percent. And that treatment is both expensive and dangerous in other ways. A typical regimen is up to 40 pills a day for up to two years. And if you don't have the money for the newer drugs, you're taking the older ones which have side effects like deafness, kidney failure and psychosis.

The new drug though, Nix-TB, only required patients to take five pills a day for six months. This was composed of three drugs, that doctors even believe might one day be combined into a single daily pill, like HIV drugs. Not only does that minimizes the side-effects, but reduces the chance patients will stop treatment because of how awful the drugs make them feel.

Dr. Gerald Friedland, one of the discoverers of XDR-TB, said that though Nix uses drugs that might have other risks, it's a chance we have to take now. "If this works as well as it seems to, we need to do this now."