Chicago: A new study revealed that a new regime of antibiotics (drugs) used to cure highly infective and fatal (TB) could markedly cut the time required to treat the disease from six months to four.

At a conference of the American Society for Microbiology, on Tuesday, a team of Brazilian and US TB specialists stated that adding moxifloxacin to a standard combination of other antibiotic drugs augmented by 17% the number of patients who cleared up active TB infectivity from their lungs, bringing up cure rates from 68% to 85%, after just two months of therapy, and when compared to patients taking the standard combination with older antibiotic drug, ethambutol.

The findings were presented Wednesday in Chicago during the 47th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

The study senior author Richard Chaisson, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and international health at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said, “This is the most compelling evidence in nearly 25 years that a novel antibiotic drug combination works better than the current gold standard at curing active TB infection.”

Chaisson, who also heads Hopkins's Centre for Tuberculosis Research, said, “Beyond the obvious value of healing patients more quickly, a shorter treatment time could also cut down on transmission of the disease to others and make it easier for health care workers worldwide, who are overwhelmed by large numbers of patients, to treat more people and to treat them faster.”