Healthcare blogs

Drug Resistant Tuberculosis a Challenge to TB/HIV Collaborative Activities 

Globally the burden of Tuberculosis in HIV infected patients is rising as HIV positive patients have a 10% risk of developing TB annually and 50% in their lifetime. These risks may increase in High TB burden countries like Ethiopia. In order to address this challenge, TB/HIV collaborative activities are being implemented with Intensified TB case finding in HIV positive patients, Isoniazid Preventive Therapy (IPT)  and Infection Control are core components. But the great challenge come with Drug resistant Tuberculosis (DR-TB) specially Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) which is when Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (TB causing bacteria) is resistant to at least the two core drugs Rifampicin and Isoniazid. 

Prolonged duration of treatment, Drug toxicity, pill burden and poor treatment outcome make MDR-TB difficult to control Especially in HIV infected individuals it is worse. This may be due to delay in diagnosis, Overlapping toxicity with Anti-Retroviral drugs (ART), presence of other opportunistic infections, poor adherence and poor socio-economic status. In order to address this challenge, early diagnosis of TB for HIV positive patients using GeneXpert should be rapidly scaled up in all resource-limited settings as it is more sensitive and specific, has good turnover time (within half day) and It also detects whether it is resistant or sensitive to Rifampicin. So integrating DR-TB in all health systems should be enhanced and needs all stakeholders’ involvement.