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           New Initiative Spotlights TB Prevention in Latent Carriers

   by Lisa Schlein

   UNITAID, a global health initiative, is taking the old adage
   "prevention is better than cure" to heart. To that end, it has just
   launched a new multi-million dollar initiative to finance new
   treatments that can prevent the onset of full-blown tuberculosis in
   hundreds of millions of people globally living with latent TB.

   Executive Director Lelio Marmora told VOA his organization is prepared
   to spend between $40 and $80 million on innovative proposals that could
   provide simpler, shorter and cheaper treatments for people who are at
   high risk of developing tuberculosis.

   "What we aspire [to] is to have a large menu of projects to see how
   these projects would work in southern Africa and in francophone West
   Africa, the Sahel region, probably in Asia, in Latin America. It
   depends," Marmora said.

   Tuberculosis is a highly infectious airborne disease that kills some
   1.5 million people every year. The World Health Organization (WHO)
   estimates about one-third of the world's population has latent
   tuberculosis; that is, they are carriers of the disease, but not yet
   infectious.

   About 15 percent of these asymptomatic people are expected to develop
   active tuberculosis. The two groups most at risk, says WHO, are
   children under age five and people living with HIV.

   ''Big step forward

   The treatment for TB is lengthy. It requires patients to take pills
   every day for between six and 36 months. The director of WHO's Global
   TB Program, Mario Raviglione, says UNITAID's decision to invest in
   preventive treatment marks a big step forward in efforts to end TB by
   2030.

   "I think it would be a fundamental game changer because it is the first
   time we see a real move at this level of financing - using a financial
   mechanism such as this one to really move forward... This will have a
   huge impact in preventing the onset of tuberculosis for millions of
   people as well as averting deaths because once you prevent, you do not
   have the disease and you do not have the death, of course," he said.

   Raviglione added he hopes UNITAID's financing will drive the
   pharmaceutical industry to develop better, cheaper, and shorter regimes
   for the prevention of tuberculosis.
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   [1]http://www.voanews.com/content/unitaid-tuberculosis-prevention/33425
   31.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/unitaid-tuberculosis-prevention/3342531.html