The effective treatment of tuberculosis is a life-saving intervention. The global scale-up of tuberculosis therapy has averted 6 million deaths over the past 15 years, making it one of the greatest public health interventions of our lifetime.1 Unfortunately, by the time most patients are treated, they have already infected many others.2 This failure to interrupt transmission fuels the global epidemic so that every year there are more new cases of tuberculosis than in the previous year.1 National tuberculosis programs are particularly challenged by multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Globally, fewer than 2% of the estimated cases of multidrug-resistant disease are reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) and managed according to international guidelines. The vast majority of the remaining cases are probably never properly diagnosed or treated, further propagating the epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. The situation is further worsened by the epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), especially in Africa.
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