Four TB drugs added to WHO's list of prequalified medicines

The World Health Organization (WHO) added four anti-tuberculosis medicines on Friday to its list of prequalified products.

Manufactured by the generic producer MacLeods of India, these medicines will increase the choice of quality products available to procurement agencies to tackle the disease, the UN agency said in a statement.

One of the products, Cycloserine, is particularly important because it is a second-line medicine, necessary to treat tuberculosis that is resistant to standard treatment.

There is also a fixed-dose combination of ethambutol and isoniazid, which is the first product combining these two basic medicines to be prequalified. The other two medicines are Ethambutol and Pyrazinamide.

The four medicines are the first TB products in two years to be added to the WHO's list of prequalified medicines.

The addition of these four medicines will reinforce efforts to scale up access to anti-tuberculosis medicines in high-burden areas and in countries which may have only limited capacity to control and monitor pharmaceuticals, the WHO said.

Recent figures released by the WHO put the number of TB cases in 2005 at 878,7000. An estimated 1.6 million people died of the disease in 2005, 195,000 of them people living with HIV.

Source: Xinhua