Drug-resistant tuberculosis at crisis levels, warns WHO
By Kate Kelland
Reuters.com
Wed, Oct 22, 2014
LONDON (Reuters) – Multi drug-resistant tuberculosis remains at crisis levels, with about 480,000 new cases this year, and various forms of the lung disease killed about 1.5 million people in 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.
In recent years, the emergence of multi drug-resistant TB — a manmade problem caused by regular TB patients being given the wrong medicines, the wrong doses, or failing to complete their treatment — has posed an increasing global health threat.
About 9 million people contracted tuberculosis during the year and about 3.5 percent of those had a strain that was to some extent drug-resistant — cases that are much harder to treat and have significantly poorer cure rates, it said.
“There are severe epidemics in some regions, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” the U.N. health agency said in its annual assessment of the global burden of TB, noting that in many places, the treatment success rate is “alarmingly low”.
Furthermore, extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), which is even more expensive and difficult to treat than multi drug-resistant (MDR-TB) strains, has now been reported in 100 countries around the world.
Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres TB expert, Grania Brigden, said the “alarming spread of drug-resistant TB from person to person in the former Soviet Union is of critical concern, along with the growth in MDR-TB and XDR-TB cases”.
“Access to proper treatment is drastically low: only one in five people with multidrug-resistant TB receives treatment; the rest are left to die, increasing the risk to their families and communities and fuelling the epidemic,” she said in a statement.
Once known as the “white plague” for its ability to render its victims skinny, pale and feverish, TB causes night sweats, persistent coughing, weight loss and blood in the phlegm or spit. It is spread through close contact with infected people.
Of all infectious diseases, only the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS kills more people than TB.
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