ABSTRACT
Research in tuberculosis treatment has served as an important and inspirational model of how well-designed clinical trials could address important practical problems facing medical practitioners and public health officials: the efficacy of drugs in general rather than old-fashioned cures such as bedrest, the prevention of drug resistance, the use of standardized regimens to enable comparison of results between investigations, the importance of specific drugs in improving cure rates and shortening treatment duration, the efficacy of intermittent versus daily treatment, and the importance of directly observed therapy. In addition, many of the concepts that inform clinical practice today were developed using international collaborations, the most notable of which were developed by the British Medical Research Council and colleagues in East Africa, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore (1-3).
