West Meets East - WHO TuberculosisTreatment
Results of a tuberculosis trial, published in this week’s issue of The Lancet, suggest that a WHO strategy could make a valuable contribution to tuberculosis control in Russia. There has been a resurgence of tuberculosis in Russia in the past decade, mainly due to the collapse of the health-care infrastructure in the 1980s and early 1990s. Traditional Russian services for treatment of tuberculosis are very different from those in the West. Patients suspected of having the disease are referred to specialist tuberculosis hospitals or sanatoria. Treatment methods combine chemotherapy with a range of additional treatments, some of which predate the chemotherapy era (10% of patients undergo