Can your next airline ticket help tackle one of the world’s deadliest airborne diseases?

 

Can $2 help stop a disease that kills almost 2 million people a year?

 

 

 

 

 

If we come together to combat Tuberculosis (TB), the answer to these questions can easily be yes.

 

March 24 is World Tuberculosis Day. This annual event is an opportunity to raise awareness about the global TB epidemic. We’ll mark the day by explaining how your $2 through MASSIVEGOOD can help to address the most pressing issues in TB treatment and diagnosis.

 

Your micro-contributions through MASSIVEGOOD go to UNITAID, which in addition to its extensive work fighting HIV/AIDS and malaria, is one of the world’s largest suppliers of TB medicines. Providing a steady supply of treatments is a key element of the strategy to eliminate TB. After all, TB is a curable disease. Over the years, global health organizations have created a highly effective program – called DOTS – that involves a regime of several drugs under heavy supervision. Around 36 million people have been cured thanks to 15 years of DOTS, according to the World Health Organization.

 

Curing TB using this strategy takes about six months and costs around $20 – or 10 clicks on MASSIVEGOOD. Unfortunately, virulent new strains of “drug resistant” TB are evolving and these cases can cost as much as $5,000 to treat, taking as long as two years.

 

Drug resistance occurs when patients don’t adhere to their treatment. When this happens, the TB baccilli will often mutate into a new form of the disease that is immune to standard drugs – hence the need for stronger and ultimately more expensive drugs. Drug resistance is a worldwide problem, with the former Soviet Union a current hotspot. In some parts of Russia, nearly 1 out of 4 cases are drug resistant – and this strain is spreading.

 

To respond to challenges such as drug resistance, UNITAID has a set of innovative programs that ensure a steady supply of treatments and badly-needed diagnostics to practically every corner of the globe where TB is rampant:

 

 

1. UNITAID is at the forefront of battling drug resistance. The best line of defense against drug resistance is ensuring a constant supply of drugs, so patients can continue their treatment to the very end. UNITAID, with its partner the Global Drug Facility (GDF) of the Stop TB Partnership, is reducing the cost and increasing the availability of TB drugs through its First-Line Project.

 

 

2. For pateints already infected with drug resistant TB, UNITAID, together with its partners, is using the Scale-Up Program  to increase access to the special treatment needed. Through this project, it is working to reduce drug delivery times from three to six months down to three weeks. UNITAID is also encouraging more producers to enter the market, helping improve quality and reduce prices by up to 25% by 2011.

 

 

 3. In order to correctly diagnose drug-resistant TB, UNITAID is working with the Stop TB Partnership, the World Health Organization and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics to increase access to a new tool that can increase diagnostic time from three months to two days. This program can triple the amount of drug-resistant cases that are diagnosed, allowing specialists to save more lives by using the correct treatments.

 

 

 4. With its Support for Pediatric Tuberculosis Project, UNITAID, through its partners, aims to provide more than 750,000 TB treatments to children under the age of 15 by 2011. In partnership with the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Drug Facility, UNITAID has achieved significant price reductions for child-specific TB drugs. These drugs combine several pills in one, and are easier for child to take.

 

With billions of airline tickets sold every year, MASSIVEGOOD can provide a steady stream of funding to UNITAID, to make sure that its TB programs have the appropriate resources to continue saving lives!

 

Through UNITAID, created in 2006:

 

 

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