The World Health Organization (WHO)
added four anti-tuberculosis medicines on Friday to its list of prequalified
products. Manufactured by the generic producer MacLeods of

India, these medicines
will increase the choice of quality products available to procurement agencies
to tackle the disease, the UN agency said in a statement.

One of the products, Cycloserine, is
particularly important because it is a second-line medicine, necessary to treat
tuberculosis that is resistant to standard treatment.

There is also a fixed-dose combination
of ethambutol and isoniazid, which is the first product combining these two
basic medicines to be prequalified. The other two medicines are Ethambutol and
Pyrazinamide.

The four medicines are the first TB
products in two years to be added to the WHO's list of prequalified medicines.

The addition of these four medicines
will reinforce efforts to scale up access to anti-tuberculosis medicines in
high-burden areas and in countries which may have only limited capacity to
control and monitor pharmaceuticals, the WHO said.

Recent figures released by the WHO put
the number of TB cases in 2005 at 878,7000. An estimated 1.6 million people died
of the disease in 2005, 195,000 of them people living with HIV.