Forty years after the last anti tuberculosis drug was invented, new drugs came to the market and some old drugs were repurposed for drug resistant tuberculosis during the last few years.
As a result of many clinical trials, world health organization(WHO), CDC, ECDC and other international scientific societies issued new recommendations for the use of many of these drugs in the treatment of resistant tuberculosis.
Following the new recommendations, the National Tuberculosis program(NTP) of the ministry of public health of Lebanon and the TB committee in the Lebanese pulmonary society (LPS) decided to update the “Guideline for the programmatic management of drug resistant tuberculosis for Lebanon”.
for that purpose, a draft guideline was developed in the year 2020 with the support of WHO country office in Beirut. In early 2021 a meeting was convened with scientific societies and partners, to discuss the updated guideline.
During the meeting, a presentation was done by one of the authors Dr Abdel Rahman Bizri, the presentation was followed by an interactive and comprehensive discussion between participants which included LPS president Dr Zeina Aoun and representatives of other scientific societies, National referral laboratory (Laboratoire Rodolphe Merieux), WHO, IOM, NTP and the authors). NTP team worked on updating the draft taking into account participant’s comments and feedback. A final version of the guidelines is being prepared and will be published with the support of the international organization of migration(IOM) and shared with stakeholders (LPS, other scientific societies and other partners).
Beirut 16.03.2021
Dr Hiam Yaacoub
National tuberculosis program, ministry of public health