INTRO

Here is the story of Monica Juma. Monica lives in Mathare, a slum near Nairobi. She is infected with both HIV and multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB, a stronger and more persistent form of the disease that continues to kill about 1,7 million people every year. Monica has to take care of her family and there are no facilities in the slum to hospitalise her, so she needs to come to the clinic twice a day, everyday

Treatment for patients with multi-drug resistant (MDR) Tuberculosis (TB), even under optimised conditions, will succeed in barely more than half of the cases . As insufficient research and development on new drugs and diagnostics has left health staff without the right tools to treat the disease, some patients will go on to develop extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB regardless of the quality of care they are offered. The situation is particularly alarming when treating people co-infected with TB and HIV. «In places where we see a lot of HIV/AIDS, the risk of MDR-TB spreading is a terrifying, but all too likely prospect,» said Dr. Liesbet Ohler from MSF’s programme in Mathare. «It's hard not to feel like we’Äôre fighting a losing battle with the tools we have today.»