MDR-TB Treatment & Prevention
Scaling Up Programmatic Management of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Prioritized Research Agenda
Summary Points:
* The World Health Organization calls for massive scale-up of programmatic management of drug-resistant tuberculosis in resource-limited settings.
* Several technical and operational barriers impede the achievement of this scale-up.
* A research agenda, developed by the Stop TB Partnership, identifies the most important barriers and prioritizes the research questions to be addressed in order to overcome these barriers.
* Research priorities include: new and improved tools for drug resistance testing; clinical trials of simplified and shorter second-line treatment regimens; new and improved strategies for diagnosis of drug-resistant tuberculosis, treatment adherence, and infection control; understanding of the geographic variations in occurrence of drug resistance; and clinical trials of prophylactic treatment of contacts of patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis.
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