Drug-Resistant
TB Is Spreading
Around the World
By BETSY MCKAY
February 27, 2008; Page B6
A dangerous form of tuberculosis that is resistant to the most powerful drugs available is spreading rapidly around the world as efforts to combat it are lagging behind, a new World Health Organization report says.
Rates of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in parts of the former Soviet Union have reached the highest levels ever recorded, reflecting the effects of poor funding for TB treatment, slow diagnoses that prevent health officials from pinpointing cases of MDR-TB quickly and a failure to treat patients until they are fully cured, the United Nations public health agency said.
The report is the largest to date on the scale of tuberculosis drug resistance, with data gathered between 2002 and 2006 on 90,000 TB patients in 81 countries, the WHO said. Globally, about 500,000 new cases of MDR-TB are diagnosed every year, making up about 5% of the nine million new TB cases.
The highest rate of MDR-TB infection was in Baku, Azerbaijan, where 22% of all new TB cases were found to be multidrug-resistant. MDR-TB cases made up 19% of all new TB diagnoses in Moldova; 16% in Donetsk, Ukraine; 15% in Russia's Tomsk region; and 15% in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
And that might not even be the whole picture, the WHO cautioned. Only six countries in Africa, the region of the world with the highest incidence of TB, were able to provide data about drug resistance.
MDR-TB, a contagious respiratory disease, is caused by TB germs resistant to at least the two most powerful anti-TB drugs. Curing it can take as much as two years of treatment that is far costlier than using the more powerful drugs. Public health experts have been promoting strategies and programs to combat MDR-TB for several years. But they say new drugs are urgently needed, along with faster diagnostic tests to identify drug-resistant TB strains.
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