ISGP Podcast: Quoth the Raven

Not long ago, tuberculosis was relatively easy to treat: give the patient a long course of isoniazid or rifampin and let the drugs run their course. But non-compliance and other issues have resulted in evolution of drug-resistant tuberculosis, making TB a lethal threat once again. The World Health Organization declared that there were more than 9 million new cases of tuberculosis in 2009 alone. But the reason it’s been discussed with such urgency these days is because, over the last few decades, a drug-resistant variant of tuberculosis has emerged.

Learn about how health policy experts suggest dealing with this problem during discussions of a paper titled “Preventing the Untreatable: Why Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Must be Prevented” from the ISGP conference on Emerging and Persistent Infectious Disease: Focus on Prevention, which was convened by the Institute on Science for Global Policy in San Diego, California, back in 2011. The paper was written by Dr. Timothy C. Rodwell, Assistant Professor in the Division of Global Public Health at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine.

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