A study conducted in eight countries indicates high rates of drug resistant tuberculosis. Moreover, resistant strains become more costly to treat and often end fatally. Almost 9 million people a year get TB and 1.4 million of them die.
TB is a bacterial infection that destroys patients’ lung tissue, making them cough and sneeze and spread germs through the air. According to experts anyone with active TB can infect between 10 and 15 people a year.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that more than 2 million people will be infected with MDR TB by 2015.
The levels of the lung disease tuberculosis resistant to up to four powerful antibiotic drugs in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America drugs are disturbingly high.
The Lancet medical journal published a research, according to which rates of both multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) were higher than it was thought before. This may threaten the global efforts to stop the disease.
Sven Hoffner of the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control commented that the MDR-TB prevalence we face in some places now is 10 times higher than the initial international recommendations for TB control .
TB has turned into a worldwide pandemic that in 2010 infected 8.8 million people, 1.4 million of whom died. What is more, drug-resistant strains are more costly and difficult to treat and often result in the death of the patient.
It is a long process to treat even normal TB. Patients have to take powerful antibiotics for six months. Many of them don’t complete the treatment correctly and probably this is the cause for the rise of the drug-resistant form.
Studies on the rates of the disease in Estonia, Latvia, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and Thailand indicate that almost 44 percent of cases of MDR TB were also resistant to at least one second-line drug.
According to Tracy Dalton from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so far, XDR-TB has been reported in 77 countries worldwide. She said that more resistance to second-line drugs may emerge, as more people are treated for drug-resistant TB. She also added that the spread of these drug-resistant strains was particularly alarming in areas with poor healthcare resources and limited access to effective drugs.
TB is a bacterial infection that destroys patients’ lung tissue, making them cough and sneeze and spread germs through the air. According to experts anyone with active TB can infect between 10 and 15 people a year.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that more than 2 million people will be infected with MDR TB by 2015.
Dalton and colleagues discovered that rates of resistance were different for the different countries.
The data shows that resistance to any second-line drug emerged in nearly 44 percent of patients, ranging from 33 percent in Thailand to 62 percent in Latvia.
The experts found resistance to at least one second-line injectable drug in around a fifth of cases. This ranged from 2 percent in the Philippines to 47 percent in Latvia.
XDR-TB was detected in 6.7 percent of patients.
These results are alarming, especially for areas with high prevalence of MDR-TB.
