It was a story no doctor wants to tell. 

But at Botšabelo Hospital in Maseru, Lesotho, during a recent training on mental health care, a doctor related the story of a man who had successfully completed two grueling years of treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB—only to succumb to a different, devastating illness, that far too often goes unseen.   

Usually poor. Generally living in the slums or countryside. Busy just trying to stay alive. People who suffer tuberculosis struggle to be seen, let alone treated.

On behalf of them, today Dr. Paul Farmer, a founder of Partners In Health, and Dr. Joanne Liu, the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, published a jointly written op-ed in Project Syndicate, a Czech-based organization that offers free news commentary to some 500 media outlets around the world. 

Partners In Health community health worker Patricia Mankuah often uses a motorcycle taxi to reach her patients in Harper, a town in remote southern Liberia, and last summer, she frequently hired Paul*, a friendly, trusted 30-something with a reliable motorcycle.

A severe form of tuberculosis killed Moeketsi Ts'osane’s mother in 2008, and one of his brothers in 2010. Health workers suspect the disease may also have contributed to the 2005 death of Ts'osane’s father, who had worked as a miner in South Africa.

So when Ts'osane was diagnosed with MDR-TB himself, in 2015, his family and friends had grim hopes for his future.

“The people around me, because of what had happened…to them, it was the end of me,” the 29-year-old Ts'osane said in February, sitting at work in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. 

Slowing the spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Lesotho means going to many more places than hospitals and clinics.

It means going to taxi associations. Mining companies. High schools. Primary schools. Prisons and police facilities.

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.

It was a landmark, a triumph, a watershed moment—without fanfare. On Oct. 6, two doctors stood under the awning of a yellow hospital on the western edge of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and gave instructions to the first patients to be discharged from the first tuberculosis treatment program of its kind in the country.

“If you have a problem, if you have a question, call us,” one doctor said. “You have my number.”

Partners In Health (PIH), Interactive Research and Development (IRD) and the Zero TB Initiative (ZTBI) welcome the release of the interim results from the STREAM Stage 1 clinical trial. This is the first clinical trial of a new treatment regimen for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), and we congratulate the investigators for successfully conducting it.