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 The price of bedaquiline and delamanid, two new drugs for treating
TB which are recommended by the World Health Organization, should be
reduced, by up to 98 percent in the case of delamanid, to make them
more accessible to 150,000 patients who need them, MSF said.
"The potential of these new drugs means that I am seeing people with
extensively drug-resistant TB walk out of the hospital who otherwise
would be dead," said Yoseph Tassew, MSF medical coordinator for
Russia.
"It's frustrating that after half a century, we finally have new TB
medicines that can save the lives of the sickest patients, but we
can't offer this hope to all people who could immediately benefit,"
he said in a statement.
Bedaquiline is marketed by U.S. pharmaceuticals firm Johnson &
Johnson, while delamanid is marketed by Otsuka Pharmaceutical of
Japan, MSF said.
In Armenia, which has one of the highest rates in the world of multi
drug-resistant TB, 80 percent of patients who received a
"strengthened" treatment containing bedaquiline, had no sign of the
infection six months later, MSF said in a report.
In Russia the recovery rate was 75 percent, MSF said, adding that
both were significantly above the 50 percent recovery rate for such
patient using current TB treatments.
The WHO has said that multi drug-resistant TB is at "crisis levels",
with about 480,000 new cases in 2013.
The problem is a manmade one, the WHO says, caused by regular TB
patients being given the wrong medicines or doses, or failing to
complete their course of treatment, which is highly toxic and can
last up two years.
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The WHO has said TB now rivals HIV/AIDS as a leading cause of death
from infectious diseases.
The price of a single course of delamanid in developing countries is
$1,700 per person, MSF said in a report analyzing access to
treatments for drug-resistant TB.
While bedaquiline is available to a "fraction" of people in the
poorest countries through a donation program, other countries may
have to pay up to $3,000 per course, it said.
The price of current treatment for drug-resistant TB has fallen to
between $1,800 and $4,600 now from $4,400 to $9,000 per person per
course in 2011, and adding the new TB drugs to the existing ones
would drive prices back up, MSF said.
(Reporting by Magdalena Mis, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit
Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters,
that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and
climate change. Visit news.trust.org)
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