'Game changer' for TB
New drug to reduce dosage, time required to treat latent tuberculosis
Stewart Burnett
Northern News Services
Monday, April 4, 2016
NUNAVUT
With an incidence rate up to 40 times greater than the national average, tuberculosis in Canada's North continues to be a significant health issue."
Residents of Iqaluit and Ottawa will be the first able to enroll in a study of a new drug combination that reduces the treatment of latent TB to just 12 weeks from nine months in a study dubbed Taima TB 3HP, led by Dr. Gonzalo Alvarez.
"TB is still a considerable problem in Nunavut," said Alvarez, who is a lung specialist for the Ottawa Hospital and Nunavut.
"What the focus of our work has been is to try and prevent the disease from developing in the first place."
Latent or dormant TB can develop into active TB disease, he said, and it would be preferable to treat the disease in its latent form than once it has become active and contagious.
"Treating the latent or dormant infection was central to the work that we are now proposing to do," said Alvarez.
The new treatment is based on administering once-a-week doses for 12 weeks, compared to current treatment that requires about 80 doses in total over nine months.
"It's a big step forward in what we know," said Alvarez.
He's hoping more people accept and complete the treatment for his study.
Margaret Ishulutak, an Iqaluit woman, was diagnosed with active TB in 2014.
"TB changed my life," she stated in a news release.
"I had to be quarantined for four weeks and I had to take hundreds of pills over the course of many months to get rid of it. I'm very glad that Dr. Alvarez and his team are doing research that may help us prevent this terrible disease."
Alvarez's study will see 225 participants with latent TB in Iqaluit be treated with the new drug, along with a parallel project in Ottawa.
Iqaluit Public Health is actively looking for people to enroll in the program and help the study find positive results.
"We're hoping if we have positive findings that we would be looking at expanding this throughout the territory," said Alvarez.
