We have carried Tuberculosis (TB) for far too long, we need to move away from a narrow focus on treatment in order to end TB. Despite TB being both a curable and treatable disease, millions of people are still dying from the disease every year. It’s time to revisit how we’re tackling this disease, and adopt a comprehensive approach to prevention, detection and treatment.
Those who live with TB patients have a 25 times higher risk of progression from latent to active TB than the general population. And children up to five years age have the highest risk of progression from infection to TB disease.
Treatment for latent TB infection has been available since the 1960s, yet very few people who are eligible for TB preventive therapy are taking it. Current treatment options are long—with people required to take a pill daily for 6 to 36 months. Even among those who start treatment, many fail to complete the full course.
This is why the IMPAACT4TB project- led by The Aurum Institute, is introducing a new way to tackle latent Tuberculosis (TB) infection—the seedbed of TB—in order to slow and ultimately stop the flood of new TB cases occurring every year. We’re doing this by identifying and providing new, shorter treatment options for people with latent TB infection.
Aurum is the lead implementer in Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa and with consortium will implement innovative strategies to deliver 3HP to high risk groups in the 12 project countries, and the lessons learned along the way will be used to support scale up globally and contribute to meeting the global End TB targets.
These countries are all high burden settings with distinct delivery challenges and are representative of the various TB epidemics where latent TB infection plays a unique role in sustaining their epidemics.
