Tetyana Pylypenko is from Ukraine and has been working with MSF for over 10 years in her home country and abroad. She comes from a nursing background, and in 2014 held the position of Medical Team Leader in Nukus, Karakalpakstan region, Uzbekistan. Below she explains more about her work with tuberculosis (TB) patients.

Maui/New York, July 24, 2015—Trade negotiators must remove damaging access to medicines provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal or risk locking in high drug prices and endangering the health of millions of people for decades to come, said the medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as negotiations resumed in Maui, Hawaii, today.  MSF’s call comes as reports indicate that this could be the last negotiation before the agreement is concluded.

New MSF report surveying lay counsellor policies across eight countries highlights major weaknesses for adherence support.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says a new combination of drugs created to treat extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is having a significant impact on a group of patients in the midst of a two-year treatment to cure their disease.

Millions of people in developing countries could be affected if India caves in to pressure.

On 13 May, TB Alliance announced the start of its Nix-TB (New Investigational Drugs for XDR-TB) clinical trial, the first to test a new all-oral regimen for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB).

WHO announcement: WHO moves to improve access to lifesaving medicines for hepatitis C, drug-resistant TB and cancers

Current modes of research and development have failed to deliver new and better TB regimens to patients; as such, MSF and others are proposing a new way to conduct TB regimen research, in the form of the 3P project. The ‘3P Project’ aims to rapidly deliver affordable, effective new regimens for TB through an open collaborative approach to conducting drug development, using novel approaches to financing and coordinating R&D.

MSF continues to express concern over the use of limited-scope donation programmes as a primary means of providing access to new TB drugs in countries affected by drug-resistant TB, as they are not a long-term solution to facilitating scale-up of treatment.

Berlin/New Delhi, 13-April-15: On the occasion of the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Germany, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) calls on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to refrain from pushing for harmful IP provisions in the EU-India free trade agreement which is currently under negotiation. The EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) has been in negotiations since 2007. From the outset, the European Commission has pushed to include provisions that would undermine India’s ability to produce affordable medicines on which millions of people in developing countries rely.