A million children worldwide develop tuberculosis every year.
A six-month course of pills can cure the disease and ward off the threat of death forever. The problem is that children with tuberculosis have to pop in the same pills as adults, and we all know how good kids are with large, metallic tasting medicines.
A big lacuna in the treatment of tuberculosis has been the lack of kid-friendly drugs. As a result, many children drop the treatment mid-way. Also, crushed up portions of adult-sized medicines never gave precise dosages to kids. As a result, 32,000 children across the world (mostly in countries like India) get the deadly superbugs, which make treatment tougher and are often fatal (source: CDC Atlanta). What’s worse, the number of children contracting TB is 25% more than what the World Health Organisation had predicted five years back.
But now the announcement of a berry-flavoured child-friendly drug is a huge leap against this deadly disease which kills a fourth of the children it affects.
The New Pediatric Treatment
Making a kids’ version of the TB drug was a no brainer, but till now there was no push for pharma giants to develop a drug for the disease which mostly affects the third world countries.
To say that tuberculosis treatment is hard would be an understatement. Nearly 4 to 6 daily tablets for 6 months and several injections every week have to be administered. No wonder, kids who are given crushed adult pills, mixed with fruit juices, drop the treatment midway.
According to the World Health Organisation, children around the world do not get the right tuberculosis dosages but all that will change with the new version of the old drug.
For the first time, we have appropriate treatment for the million children who have tuberculosis, with a formulation of drug that is easy for kids to take, that tastes good and that will hopefully make the disease much easier to treat.Dr Mel Spigelman, President, TB Alliance
The initial roll-out of the new drug will be in the first half of 2016 and it will be available at Rs 900 for a month’s dose in India.
Learning From South Africa’s TB Model
South Africa has the third largest TB epidemic in the world, only behind India and China. And now it has launched a five-year-long campaign to comb through the high risk population and not let a single person go undiagnosed. The aim is, by 2017, nearly 90% of the country would have been screened for the deadly disease.
On the other hand, India’s TB programme, riddled with corruption and budget cuts, is almost derailing.
A report by the Joint Monitoring Mission of the RNTCP admits that in the last two years more than a million people living with tuberculosis in the country have gone undiagnosed or unreported. And coupled with the fact that 10% TB drugs in the country are fake or counterfeit, there has been an acute shortage of drugs for MDR-TB since 2013, India might just be losing all the progress it has made to curb this deadly disease.
TB already causes an estimated 100 million workdays’ loss. The country will also incur a loss of nearly US$ 3 billion in indirect costs and US$ 300 million in direct costs (Source: RNTCP).
Rising cases of drug resistant TB will only exaggerate this problem. India can no longer afford to be indifferent to the rise of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The disease does not only flourish in faraway slums, it is haunting urban India at a potentially great cost.
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