Rebecca Stevens (R), a field worker for the National Tuberculosis Program, gives medicine to a young girl. (Getty)
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a tuberculosis drug, making it the first new medicine to fight the deadly infection in more than four decades.
The agency approved Johnson & Johnson’s pill, Sirturo, for use with older drugs to fight a hard-to-treat strain of tuberculosis that has not responded to other medications. However, the agency cautioned that the drug does carry risks of potentially deadly heart problems and should be prescribed carefully by doctors.
Roughly, one-third of the world’s population is estimated to be infected with the bacteria causing tuberculosis. While the disease is rare in the U.S., it does kill about 1.4 million people worldwide. Of those, about 150,000 succumb to the increasingly common drug-resistant forms of the disease. About 60 percent of all cases are concentrated in China, India, Russia and Eastern Europ
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