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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2007;298:277.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 147 words of the full text and any section headings.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched an initiative to prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) and save as many as 134 000 lives by 2008 (http://www.who.int/tb/publications/2007/global_response_plan.pdf).

The new initiative, from the WHO and the Stop TB Partnership (a network of more than 500 organizations and countries), will cost $2.15 billion over the next 2 years. The plan outlines actions the groups say are needed to help control the spread of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), such as strengthening laboratories' ability to diagnose MDR-TB and XDR-TB, increasing the treatment of drug-resistant cases to 110 000 by 2008, and funding research into new drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines.

Strains of MDR-TB are resistant to standard treatment, including the first-line drugs isoniazid and rifampicin; XDR-TB strains are also resistant to 3 or more of the 6 classes of second-line drugs.