[Treatment of tuberculosis: what is new?]

Never before have so many people around the world been simultaneously affected by tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death from a bacterial infectious disease worldwide. The World Health Organization's ambitious goal from 2014 of achieving global elimination of tuberculosis does not seem realistic, but on current trends, tuberculosis could be eliminated in the European Union by 2040. Since the beginning of 2022, there have been more innovations for the treatment of tuberculosis than in no other comparable time period before. One month of rifapentine and isoniazid is effective in treating latent tuberculosis infection. However, rifapentine is licensed in the USA but not in the EU and must be imported for individual cases. The duration of the standard treatment for tuberculosis can be shortened to four months but this treatment regimen is also based on rifapentine, in addition to isoniazid, pyrazinamide, and moxifloxacin. The approval of rifapentine in Europe is a much-needed step towards shortening the treatment of tuberculosis. With new drugs an even shorter standard treatment of only 2 months is possible. The treatment of multidrug-resistant/rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-/RR-TB) has been shortened to six months, the same length as the standard treatment available in Germany. The combination of bedaquiline, pretomanid, linezolid ± moxifloxacin, cured around 90% of affected patients were cured in studies with a treatment duration of six months. With 19 drugs in clinical trials, the treatment of tuberculosis is expected to continue to improve rapidly in the coming years.

Numerical modelling of conductive and convective heat transfers in retinal laser applications

The control of the temperature increase is an important issue in retinal laser treatments. Within the fundus of the eye heat, generated by absorption of light, is transmitted by diffusion in the retinal pigment epithelium and in the choroid and lost by convection due to the choroidal blood flow. The temperature can be spatially and temporally determined by solving the heat equation. In a former analytical model this was achieved by assuming uniform convection for the whole fundus of the eye. A numerical method avoiding this unrealistic assumption by considering convective heat transfer only in the choroid is used here to solve the heat equation. Numerical results are compared with experimental results obtained by using a novel method of noninvasive optoacoustic retinal temperature measurements in rabbits. Assuming global convection the perfusion coefficient was evaluated to 0.07 s(-1), whereas a value of 0.32 s(-1)--much closer to values found in the literature (between 0.28 and 0.30 s(-1))--was obtained when choroidal convection was assumed, showing the advantage of the numerical method. The modelling of retinal laser treatment is thus improved and could be considered in the future to optimize treatments by calculating retinal temperature increases under various tissues and laser properties.