Pills Offer New Hope in Fight Against Yaws
Study finds oral antibiotic as effective as penicillin
January 13, 2012
Azithromycin in pill form appears to be as effective in treating yaws, a neglected tropical disease, as the current standard treatment of penicillin injections.
Scientists have found that a medicine taken in pill form is just as effective in treating the neglected tropical disease yaws as the usual treatment, a shot of penicillin.
The easier-to-use therapy raises new hope for the eradication of the disease.
Yaws is a disease affecting mostly poor children in the tropics. It eats away at skin, cartilage, and bone, affecting an estimated half-million youngsters in Africa, Asia, and South America.
The standard treatment is penicillin, which can be very effective, and an international program nearly eradicated the disease in the 1950s and '60s. But in recent years yaws has reemerged, in part because many infected children don't show any symptoms, and so don't get penicillin.
"For every one case of active yaws that we see, the estimates are that there's up to eight cases of children infected with the yaws organism who don't present because they don't have symptoms at the time," says researcher Russell Hays, a physician at the remote Lihir Medical Center in Papua New Guinea. "And so for that reason, just treating active cases when they come up will never eliminate the disease."
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