WHO updates the list of drug-resistant bacteria most threatening to human health, including Rifampicin Resistant TB as a critical AMR pathogen.

The World Health Organization (WHO) released its updated Bacterial Priority Pathogens List (BPPL) 2024, featuring 15 families of antibiotic-resistant bacteria grouped into critical, high, and medium categories for prioritization. The list guides the development of new and necessary treatments to stop the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In this update, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, rifampicin-resistant (included after an independent analysis with parallel tailored criteria, and subsequent application of an adapted multi-criteria decision analysis matrix) was included as a critical priority.

RR-TB poses significant additional challenges to those of drug-susceptible (DS)-TB in terms of diagnosis, treatment, clinical management, and overall public health response. The capacity to detect resistance to rifampicin and to most anti-TB medicines remains severely limited worldwide. Treatment regimens for RR-TB are orders of magnitude more expensive and toxic than those used for DS-TB, leading to high rates of patient loss to follow-up before treatment completion and low cure rates. While novel and recently recommended regimens may improve the situation, resistance to new core drugs like bedaquiline is already emerging, and treatment options for bedaquiline-resistant TB are also severely limited. Additionally, the financial impact of people with RR-TB is tremendous, with 82% of affected households facing catastrophic total costs. For the full document follow the link 9789240093461-eng.pdf (who.int).