Mark Dybul, Executive Director of the Global Fund has written an email responding to a letter from 220 civil society organizations demanding that the Global Fund abandon its “tiered-pricing” proposal.

Phumeza Tisile, co-author of the DR-TB Manifesto and XDR-TB survivor, delivers urgent plea to World Health Assembly delegates on behalf of 50,000 supporters worldwide.

Islamabad—Around 420,000 people develop active tuberculosis each year in the country with 65 percent case detection rate.

Summary

CHENNAI: Experts may fret about overprescription of drugs for tuberculosis, but it has emerged that central health authorities' mandatory dosage of a key drug for HIV-infected patients with the disease is too low for it to be effective.

Below is a communication sent by Civil Society Organizations to Mark Dybul and others calling for the abandonment of the Global Fund’s misguided tiered-pricing initiative. The CS letter is attached.

13th - 17th October 2014, International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya

A doddering healthcare system pushes many from Myanmar to cross the Indian border into the town Moreh in the northeastern state of Manipur, to seek testing and treatment. Most patients suffer from drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) and are HIV positive.

Among South Africans with HIV/TB coinfection, antiretroviral changes were rare during TB therapy when the initial regimen was efavirenz plus lamivudine and didanosine, according to analysis of 501 people in the SAPiT trial.

Starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) 2 weeks after TB therapy began did not lower proportions of African patients who reached a composite endpoint including TB treatment failure, TB recurrence, and death, according to results of a randomized double-blind trial in people with a CD4 count above 220 cells/µL. The findings contrast with two earlier trials in which starting ART early in the course of TB therapy had marked clinical benefits in people with a CD4 count below 50 or 200 cells/µL.