Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (Taiwan CDC) has recently integrated 5 professional medical teams specialized in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR–TB) patient care in Taiwan to officially take part in an international project called “Preserving Effective Tuberculosis Treatment Study”(PETTS), which is led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC).
Today, the mycobacteriology laboratory of Taiwan CDC sent the very first M. tuberculosis strain that meets the defined criteria to US CDC for further analysis, marking Taiwan’s official participation in the important, multinational research project, PETTS.
PETTS is a multinational, collaborative assessment program targeting at preserving good results of treatments for MDR-TB patients.The objectives of the program include examining the following questions, ideally, during the process when MDR-TB patients are receiving therapeutic treatments: (1) What are the rate of individual second line drugs that will produce drug resistance and the rate that will not? (2) What is the reason in the case of that no drug resistance is produced? (3) What will be the results of using second line drugs? (4) In the case of producing drug resistance, what are its effects on the therapeutic results? (5) If following the treatment directions recommended by WHO for MDR-TB cases, will it be able to prevent from producing drug resistance as a side effect of using second line therapeutic medications? And so forth.Currently, the 9 countries that have joined the program include Estonia, Latvia, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.
According to the PETTS design, Taiwan CDC will be responsible for continuously monitoring MDR-TB patients under long-term treatments until cured, but will not be involved in the medical treatment of the patients.On the other hand, the five aforementioned professional medical teams specialized in MDR-TB patient care will be in charge of screening for potential cases and designing medical treatment for the targeted patients.Through participation in the PETTS program, Taiwan will also be able to make an integral assessment of the implementation of DOTS-Plus in Taiwan, formulate strategy and guidelines for drug prescription, share MDR-TB medical care system with other countries, and upgrade the capability and capacity of the existing TB control and prevention program in Taiwan.
In July 2006, Taiwan CDC launched the“Halving TB Prevalence in Ten Years”plan.To achieve the goal of the plan, the agency has formulated 4 major strategies: (1) amend existing national TB control program; (2) reinforce new case detection mechanism; (3) improve the chance of TB cases to be cured; and (4) strengthen international collaboration.In addition, starting from May 2007, the agency has actively implemented “MDR TB Medical Care System”aiming to transfer every MDR-TB patient in Taiwan to the care of special medical needs teams.