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August 14, 2019 10:50 pm

Scientists Discover a Cure For the Deadliest Strain of Tuberculosis

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."

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