More on Moxifloxacin; and good news for mice!

A team of Brazilian and US TB experts reported at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology that adding the drug moxifloxacin to a standard cocktail of antibiotics increased by 17 percent the number of patients who cleared active TB infection from their lungs, from 68 to 85 percent. The drug mixture shortened by two months the time needed to cure the dreaded lung ailment which kills some 1.5 million people each year, mostly in developing countries, experts reported at a meeting of the 47th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC).
The new combination drug therapy uses moxifloxacin in the place of an older, more traditional anti-TB drug, ethambutol.
"This is the most compelling evidence in nearly 25 years that a novel antibiotic drug combination works better than the current gold standard at curing active TB infection," said study senior author Richard Chaisson, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and international health at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"Beyond the obvious value of healing patients more quickly, a shorter treatment time could also cut down on transmission of the disease to others and make it easier for health care workers worldwide, who are overwhelmed by large numbers of patients, to treat more people and to treat them faster" said Chaisson, who also heads Hopkins's Center for Tuberculosis Research. He noted nearly nine million new cases of TB are diagnosed each year in the world, and more than one-and-a-half million people die from the disease.
"Better vaccines, diagnostics, and drugs could dramatically improve the fight against TB, especially in poor countries where large numbers of people are affected by the disease," said Peter Small, senior program officer for Tuberculosis at the Gates Foundation.
Another study on mice performed by Johns Hopkins researchers and released at the conference found that replacing the antibiotics rifampin and isoniazide with moxifloxacin and rifapentine allow lab mice to get over TB in 10 weeks rather than six months
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