A new six-month treatment regimen for drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis is expected to be rolled out in the public sector – current regimens take anything from nine to 18 months. Here we unpack why the switch is important and outline what still needs...
Work is underway in South Africa to amend the country’s national guidelines for drug-resistant tuberculosis to provide a shorter, six-month, all-oral regimen as a new standard of care treatment.
Dr Norbert Ndjeka, director of South Africa’s TB programme, hopes that by implementing BPaL/BPaLM as a standard of care regimen, South Africa will once again be the world’s first in improving DR-TB treatment and care. He notes that South Africa was the first country to remove painful injectables with difficult side effects from DR-TB treatment regimens, as well as the first country to introduce bedaquiline as part of standard of care treatment.
According to Ndjeka, the Department of Health is planning to implement BPaL/BPaLM as a standard of care regimen for DR-TB between September and December this year. By January 2023, all eligible DR-TB patients should be initiated onto a BPaL/BPaLM regimen, if new national guidelines under development are approved by the country’s National Health Council, he says.
He adds that in addition to reducing the length of treatment, the new regimen will significantly reduce the number of pills that patients must take over the course of their treatment. Current standard of care regimens require people receiving DR-TB treatment to take up to 23 pills per day. BPaL/BPaLM will reduce this pill burden to 23 pills per week, says Ndjeka. “When you decrease the pill burden you enhance ability for people to take tablets,” he says.
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