While pregnant with her second child, Maral Shorayeva began experiencing symptoms that felt like a cold or flu, but when she went to give birth to her daughter, doctors recognized that something was wrong. They suspected she had tuberculosis. Shorayeva, who was 25 at the time, says a nurse took her newborn away immediately, without giving her a chance to hold her daughter. She had already gone through more than a year of TB treatment while pregnant with her first child, her son Bagdad, who was born in 2016.

Laboratory Director Roger Calderon needed more space to support tuberculosis work in Lima, Peru, so he led design and construction of a new lab made from a shipping container. Four people can work in the 400-square-foot facility, which has centrifuges, freezers and a customized ventilation system that recirculates the air 27 times an hour.

When asked how many tuberculosis (TB) patients she’s treated over the past 20 years in Kazakhstan, Dr. Zhenisgul Daugarina smiled before giving numbers for just the past three.

"Over the past three years, 268 patients have been discharged from (our) MDR/XDR-TB treatment department, and another 568 have been transferred to other units to continue treatment," she said.

Partners In Health and collaborators are taking big steps forward in the fight against tuberculosis in Kazakhstan, where increasing use of the first new TB drugs in decades, an innovative clinical trial, and digital technologies that better connect patients to caregivers all are raising hopes for more successful treatments.