Welcome to the Working Group on New TB Drugs Blog
Financial Times Video Interviews on Combating TB
For World TB Day, the Financial Times’ Andrew Jack interviewed various members of the TB community to get their take on a range of topics. Interviewees are Paul Stoffels, head of R&D at Johnson & Johnson; Lucy Cheshire, a Kenyan campaigner; Paul Sommerfeld, chairman of TB Alert; Al Story, the clinical lead of a UK charity.
Hans Rosling Details the Lack of TB News Coverage
Compared to the widespread news coverage during the swine flu outbreak, TB receives little coverage, especially when you calculate the ratio of news hits to mortality. During a 13 day period in April and May of 2009, the WHO confirmed 31 deaths from swine flu. In that same period, the WHO shows approximately 60,000 deaths from tuberculosis. Prof. Hans Rosling tracked news coverage of each disease using Google news search and found that swine flu was being hyped to a tremendous degree relative to the mortality figures while TB was practically being ignored.
Dr. Lee Reichman responds to TB and Haiti crisis
Last week, a story in the NY Times explored the emerging threat of drug-resistant TB spreading in the aftermath of the tragic earthquake in Haiti.
On Sunday, Feb 14, the NY Times published in a letter to editor from Dr. Lee Reichman, MD, MPH (Professor and Executive Director, UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School Global Tuberculosis Institute) in [...]
TB in Haiti After the Earthquake
Even before the recent earthquake shook large portions of Haiti to rubble, the country already had the highest tuberculosis rate in the Americas (roughly 30,000 new cases each year). With the health infrastructure now mostly in ruins, TB is likely to rise even further.
The New York Times’ Ian Urbina writes how the country’s sole tuberculosis [...]
