A clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the oral antibiotic levofloxacin taken once-daily for six months substantially reduced the risk of developing drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), and almost halved adults’ and children’s risk of developing multidrug-resistant TB.
“Multidrug-resistant TB is a major global public health problem, affecting over 400,000 people each year. It is associated with significantly poorer outcomes than drug-susceptible TB,” said Professor Gregory Fox, Director of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Tuberculosis who led the VQUIN trial at the University of Sydney’s Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in collaboration with the Vietnam Tuberculosis Program.
“We now have a way of stopping people with early TB infection from becoming…