Measuring the effect of tuberculosis control: A step forward

摘要

Tuberculosis is an age old disease. Remarkably, although the DNA of Mycobacterium tuberculosis was found in mammoth's bones and lesions in Egyptian mummies, the pandemic continues to exist and must be a public health priority in the third millennium. Although tuberculosis control poses a myriad of challenges to clinicians and public health authorities, the disease is potentially preventable and curable. Efforts to produce more efficient vaccines have been less than successful to date, but effective diagnostics and drugs are nevertheless currently available, and control and elimination strategies have been recently developed. The tuberculosis research community has pioneered prevention trials with new vaccines, and clinical trials on new drugs and combination regimens, attempting to evaluate their cost-effectiveness at programmatic level.