Global spread of drug-resistant TB
Posted by Celia Walter | 19 Apr, 2010Strains of tuberculosis resistant to normal drug treatments (isoniazid and rifampicin) are spreading around the globe, the World Health Organization has reported. The story is also covered by the ‘Guardian', with links to related sources of information. An estimated 440,000 people worldwide had multi-drug-resistant forms of the disease (MDR-TB) in 2008 (the last year for which complete figures are available). One third of them died. Even more alarming is the extensively drug resistant form of the disease (XDR-TB), which is also resistant to second line treatments including fluoroquinolone antibiotics. XDR-TB first came to attention following an outbreak in 2006 in South Africa, which within 3 weeks killed all but one of 53 people infected. The WHO provides links to documents and news reports on MDR-TB and XDR-TB.
After HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis is the leading infectious disease as a killer of adults, leading to 1.8 million deaths a year, or one every 20 seconds. Drug resistance makes control a formidable undertaking, with the drug resistant forms of the disease costing 50-200 times more to treat than the ordinary kind, and involving two years of chemotherapy. Particularly high levels of resistance have been seen in parts of India, China and Russia, and there is a real risk that drug resistant TB could spread globally out of control. Intute : Medicine has links to more than 80 resources on tuberculosis.
Intute blog Posted April 16th, 2010 by Rob Abbott