Professor Salome Charalambous

Once someone is tested for TB, we try to make sure that they also get tested for drug resistance.

And in most cases, as I said, they would have drug-sensitive TB.

But then another common type of resistance is rifampicin-resistant TB, which means they then are resistant to the main drug that is in the first-line regimen, which is rifampicin.

Once somebody is actually resistant to more than rifampicin, they're called multi-drug resistant TB.

But if someone is resistant to rifampicin and other drugs, then the choices start to become less.

And then we get, eventually we can get to what we call extensively drug resistant TB, which is when you are resistant to the big guns like bedaquiline,

and another drug which is called moxifloxacin or the quinolones.

So that then makes it very difficult to treat the person because basically many of the drugs that we use won't work in that person.

We have to actually find the other drugs and try different combinations of drugs and so on.

So that's the different types of TB that one gets, yeah.

Well, luckily, I mean, we are still seeing positive outcomes in those people.

You know, I think that it is a very difficult treatment.

And we have in our country, South Africa, we actually have a committee.

So in those cases, the committee, the doctors will actually refer to the committee, give all the information online.

on the person, and then the committee will help the clinician at the hospital to decide what kind of drugs to put the person on and then monitor.

So it's not a great thing, as you can imagine, and in many cases it would actually require

that the person spends quite a bit of time in hospital because then the treatment's actually an injection.

Some of the treatments are like an injection, like a daily injection.

So those cause more problems.

But as I said before, 95% of patients,