TB is worse than you think!

Read "Virulent New Strain of TB Raising Fears of Pandemic: Bug Is Resistant to Most Available Drugs" by Peter Finn, The Washington Post, May 3, 2007.

Worldwide, an estimated 1.7 million people die every year of tuberculosis. Today, one in three people globally is estimated to be infected with the TB bacterium, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Most will never get sick, but in one in 10 infections the bacterium becomes active and the individual suffers from the disease. Ten percent of two billion plus people is 200 million plus! When the disease is active, the patient coughs and spreads the germs to infect others.

"Active TB bacteria are treated with four standard drugs. In most cases, patients quickly become non-infectious and start to feel better, although they are considered cured only after a full course of treatment, lasting about six months." The problem of course is compliance, since patients who feel better stop taking the drugs, often letting the bacteria that survived the drug reestablish the disease and infect others. And so drug resistance spreads.

People with weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable to TB, for the obvious reasons. Of course, HIV/AIDS patients are not only vulnerable, they are already dealing with difficult and expensive treatment regimes, and often facing economic difficulties. Worse still, joint HIV-TB infections seem to occur most often in poor countries or poor environments where there are very few institutions or resources to deal with them.

"By the 1980s, doctors had begun to notice that some patients were resistant to these first-line drugs, particularly the two most potent ones, isoniazid and rifampicin. Multidrug-resistant TB has developed as patients are now appearing resistant to several different anti-TB drugs. Unfortunately, the second line of defense drugs tend to work more slowly, cause more side effects, and/or be more expensive.

According to this article, now a new "virulent strain of tuberculosis resistant to most available drugs is surfacing around the globe, raising fears of a pandemic that could devastate efforts to contain TB and prove deadly to people with immune-deficiency diseases such as HIV-AIDS......Known formally as extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, the strain has been detected in 37 countries."

"If it is not contained, it will almost certainly mutate again into a completely drug-resistant TB, according to Mario Raviglione, director of WHO's Stop TB Department. Some experts believe that may have already happened. Doctors reported this year that a 49-year-old woman in Italy died after 625 days of hospital treatment; all the drugs they tried failed."