Fighting drug-resistant TB was costly. Here's how that's changed →

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It was while she was in a clinic in Cape Town, South Africa, enduring the complicated, agonizing treatment for extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, that Phumeza Tisile began to question why “there weren’t better medications that had less side effects.”

In 2010, soon after her initial diagnosis with multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR-TB, Tisile had received a painful injection of the drug Kanamycin. It had caused her to go deaf essentially overnight, but did not stop the disease’s progression. She had not even been told that hearing loss was a potential side effect.

Only after she was finally cured, more than three years after starting treatment, did Tisile became aware that the drug company, Johnson & Johnson, had actually just developed a safer treatment with fewer risks. The treatment, bedaquiline, had only gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, in 2012. Had it been available to her it would have prevented her hearing loss and cut her daily pill count from 25 to fewer than 10.

She also came to understand the tangle of complications that made the treatment inaccessible to people across South Africa and in other parts of the world.

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Germany plans billions in cuts to development, humanitarian aid →

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A recently released draft budget spells out nearly €1 billion in cuts to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, or BMZ, from €11.22 billion ($12.36 billion) this year to €10.28 billion in 2025. The proposed cuts to humanitarian aid are even more drastic, with plans to slash spending by more than 50% — from €2.23 billion in 2024 to €1.04 billion next year. Read more.

Complete 2024 International AIDS Conference coverage

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