{"id":94864,"date":"2019-08-16T12:02:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-16T19:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/how-a-new-antibiotic-destroys-extremely-drug-resistant-tuberculosis"},"modified":"2019-08-16T12:02:25","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T19:02:25","slug":"how-a-new-antibiotic-destroys-extremely-drug-resistant-tuberculosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/how-a-new-antibiotic-destroys-extremely-drug-resistant-tuberculosis","title":{"rendered":"How a new antibiotic destroys extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-a-new-antibiotic-destroys-extremely-drug-resistant-tuberculosis.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fda.gov\/news-events\/press-announcements\/fda-approves-new-drug-treatment-resistant-forms-tuberculosis-affects-lungs\">approved a new antibiotic<\/a> that, when combined with two existing antibiotics, can tackle the most formidable and deadly forms of tuberculosis. The trio of drugs treats extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), along with cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) that have proven unresponsive to other treatments.<\/p>\n<p>Tuberculosis is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.who.int\/tb\/publications\/global_report\/GraphicExecutiveSummary.pdf?ua=1\">single leading infectious killer<\/a> in the world, infecting an estimated 10 million people in 2017 and killing 1.6 million of them. XDR-TB and MDR-TB are even more savage forms of the disease, which is caused by the bacterium <em>Mycobacterium tuberculosis<\/em>. The drug-resistant strains of TB kill <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lanres\/article\/PIIS2213-2600(17)30079-6\/fulltext\">an estimated 60% and 40%<\/a> of their victims, respectively.<\/p>\n<p>MDR-TB strains can resist at least the two most powerful anti-TB drugs, isoniazid and rifampin. A strain gets <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/tb\/publications\/factsheets\/drtb\/xdrtb.htm\">into XDR-territory<\/a> when they also become resistant to any fluoroquinolone drug, such as ciprofloxacin or levofloxacin, plus at least one of three injectable second-line drugs, which are amikacin, kanamycin, and capreomycin. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis infected <a href=\"https:\/\/www.who.int\/tb\/areas-of-work\/drug-resistant-tb\/MDR-RR_TB_factsheet_2018_Apr2019.pdf?ua=1\">an estimated 558,000 people<\/a> in 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a new antibiotic that, when combined with two existing antibiotics, can tackle the most formidable and deadly forms of tuberculosis. The trio of drugs treats extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), along with cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) that have proven unresponsive to other treatments. Tuberculosis is the single [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}