Eli Lilly to help train doctors on drug-resistant TB

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly will donate $1 million to train doctors treating tuberculosis (TB), a disease that infects 9 million people every year and kills nearly 2 million.

The interactive online course is meant as a refresher for physicians on the best ways to diagnose, prevent and treat the respiratory infection that spreads through coughs and sneezes and can be especially deadly for people with HIV or AIDS.

"This will allow more physicians around the world to acquire the basic knowledge on standard TB management at a time when there is a resurgence of the epidemic," Eli Lilly said in a joint statement with the World Medical Association.

The emergence and spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis germs have hindered international efforts to stop its spread. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 5 percent of tuberculosis cases worldwide cannot be cured with the first-line antibiotics normally prescribed.

Nearly a third of the world's population is infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, although active TB only develops in a fraction of those cases. The dormant bacteria can become active when a patient's immunity levels decrease, for instance if they contract HIV or become pregnant.

Public health officials blame diagnostic and treatment errors on the development of multi-drug resistant strains of tuberculosis, which can be difficult and costly to treat.

Extremely drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis that cannot be treated with standard antibiotics has also sprung up as a result of inadequate response to multi-drug resistant strains, such as when the wrong antibiotics are prescribed or when patients do not take the full course of their drugs.

Tuberculosis can also go undetected for extended periods, especially in poor countries where coughing patients can be left in close proximity to those with HIV and other immune-weakening conditions in hospitals and clinics.