Professor Salome Charalambous

Yeah.

For sure.

And, you know, there are so many of these stories and it's always so sad to hear them.

And, you know, like I am just pleased that we now no longer treat TB for 23 months.

Hopefully most people only need to take treatment for around six months, even those with drug resistant TB.

Yeah, so the new regimen that we're using now for drug-resistant tuberculosis is called BPAL.

It's a great regimen because it's only made up of four drugs.

In the past, people used to actually be on up to seven drugs.

And the B stands for bedaquiline.

So the other drugs are protaminate, linezolid, and then levofloxacin.

So that makes up BPAL.

And the good thing about BPAL is that it's an oral –

all oral regimen, which means there aren't any injectables involved.

You know, it's an all oral regimen that is safe and it's now given for six months instead of previously where the regimens were given for nine and 12 and much more.

So that is the new regimen that people have been using.

It came in about two, three years ago and it's really revolutionized drug resistant TB treatment.

So what we do is, so the most common form of TB we call drug sensitive TB.

And that is in most cases the most common form.

So, you know, in South Africa where I live, it's 95% of people have drug sensitive TB.

And that means that they would then be able to be treated with what we call the first line of treatment, which is the first four drugs that we use.