6月30日VOA聽力：肺結核新療法可收縮療程
Tuberculosis is one of the world most persistenthealth threat. Now, U.S. researchers have identifieda new way to treat infected people before they getsick. The World Health Organization saystuberculosis kills nearly two million people each year.Another two billion are at risk: they are infected, butdon't have symptoms of the disease. Those athighest risk can take medicine, but Vanderbilt University researcher Timothy Stirling says noteveryone follows through with the treatment, which is a daily dose of isoniazid for nine months.So although the medication is highly efficacious if people take all of their medication, manypeople do not take all their medication and therefore the effectiveness of the regimen isdecreased. As an alternative, Sterling and his colleagues combined isoniazid with another drug,rifapentine. The combination was taken weekly, not daily, for just three months. And theresults of this study showed that the new regimen - the three months of isoniazid andrifapentine - was as effective as the nine-month isoniazid regimen. In fact, the short-course,three-month regimen had higher treatment completion rates and was also well tolerated. Therewas one other difference. The two-drug, combination treatment was administered as "directlyobserved therapy”. That means the patients took their medicine in the presence of a healthcare worker, to ensure that they followed the treatment protocol. This was a large study,involving some 7,500 participants in North America, Spain, and Brazil. Sterling cautions thatmost of the people in this study were HIV-negative. The results might be different for HIV-positive people. A recent study in South Africa indicated that the combination therapy workswell in people infected with HIV as well as tuberculosis, but the study was too small to bedefinitive. Timothy Sterling's research, published in "The New England Journal of Medicine," hasbeen endorsed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. Thegovernment health agency recommends the 12-dose weekly combination treatment as anequal alternative to the 270-dose daily regimen that has been the standard therapy. Butbecause of possible safety issues, the CDC still recommends the daily regimen for HIV-positivepatients who are taking antiretroviral drugs or women who are pregnant. Also, because of a lackof data, the CDC says children under age 12 should stay with the nine-month daily treatment.
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