'Joint approach needed' for HIV and TB treatment

Drug companies could speed up the process of developing urgently required tuberculosis (TB) treatments by following the approach used to test HIV drugs, the medical organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has claimed.

According to a new report from the humanitarian body, testing new TB drugs in patients whose TB is resistant to standard treatment would allow researchers to detect the effectiveness of new drugs much quicker.

This strategy was first adopted during the Aids pandemic in the 1990s to speed up clinical trials , allowing for newer and better drugs to be developed quicker.

Dr Eric Goemaere, MSF head of mission in South Africa, said: "This is quite simply the best hope we have of getting improved medicines to patients with multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB faster.

"We cannot afford to wait. MDR-TB is spreading rapidly, particularly in areas like South Africa where HIV is high. And with the current drugs, many patients on MDR-TB treatment give up half-way and the majority of patients co-infected with HIV will die before the end of treatment."

MSF also called for an end to the isolation of TB patients in hospital wards for long periods of time – a practice it called "counter-productive". Instead, it suggested that they should be treated in their own communities with individualised treatment plans.

More than 500,000 new cases of MDR-TB are reported around the world every year.

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