On June 18, 2013, 170 Members of Congress wrote to President Obama complaining about Indian trade policy and more particularly India's intellectual property "climate." Under the umbrella of claiming that policies of the Government of India favor domestic producers over U.S. Exporters – in other words, that India is protectionist – the Members of Congress claimed that "the intellectual property (IP) climate has become increasingly challenging in India."

Nigerian adults with a poor CD4 or virologic response to antiretroviral therapy (ART) had a doubled or tripled risk of a new TB diagnosis, according to results of a 5000-person study.

Geneva, 13 June 2013 - The World Health Organization has today issued interim guidance on the use of bedaquiline, the first new drug to treat tuberculosis in 50 years, which received accelerated approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) on 31 December 2012. Acknowledging the growing crisis of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and the urgent need for improved drugs with better efficacy and safety profiles, WHO has taken an unprecedented step to make interim recommendations about a drug based on phase IIb clinical trial data. Given the risk-benefit considerations for many people living with MDR-TB, MSF welcomes this move to accelerate improved treatment to those who need it most.

Pyrazinamide (PZA)—a frontline tuberculosis (TB) drug—kills dormant persister bacteria and plays a critical role in shortening TB therapy. PZA is used for treating both drug susceptible and multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) but resistance to PZA occurs frequently and can compromise treatment.

A very moving article about a journalist who covered TB in Papua New Guinea for an Australian newspaper and then discovered she had MDR-TB after returning home to Australia. It highlights very well the challenges of TB, including major disparities in care.

It's the second leading cause of death by an infectious agent worldwide. Now, University of Toronto Professor Frances Jamieson is tackling drug-resistant tuberculosis with a new, lab-based surveillance system that can track the spread of the disease in real-time.

A team of Johns Hopkins researchers working with animals has developed a vaccine that prevents the virulent tuberculosis bacterium from invading the brain and causing a highly lethal condition known as TB meningitis, a disease that disproportionately occurs in TB-infected children and in adults with compromised immune systems.

The interim guidance provides advice on the inclusion of bedaquiline in the combination therapy of MDR-TB in accordance with the existing WHO Guidelines for the programmatic management of drug-resistant TB (2011 Update).

Though we still do not have a point of care diagnostic that is cheap, fast, and detects all TB including in people with HIV and children, there has been some improvement in diagnosis with direct nucleic acid amplification testing as the following article shows.

LDCs stood together and won a partial victory at the World Trade Organization delaying the time within which they must become fully compliant with global minimums for protecting patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property.  Although they committed to deliberate carefully, they won back policy space to reduce existing levels of intellectual property protection if appropriate in order to develop a viable technological base and to overcome severe and lingering capacity constraints.  This same policy space will permit them to access more affordable medicines and medical technologies, educational resources, agricultural inputs, and green and climate control technologies.