How to Stop the Fast March of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Public
health professionals have warned about drug-resistant
tuberculosis for years. Now comes news out of India and China to
feed the concern. Doctors in India have documented more than a
dozen cases of TB so tenacious, it responds to no known drug.
This is a scary proposition in a country where 2 million of the
world’s 9 million annual TB cases occur and where malnutrition,
overcrowding and a weak health system create a hotbed for the
often-fatal disease. Conventional drug resistance is also
turning out to be a problem in China, which has a million TB
cases a year. In a study published this month in the New England
Journal of Medicine, 1 of 10 TB patients there had multidrug
resistance, and 1 in 120 had extensive drug resistance.
Previously, resistance was thought to exist mainly in patients
who’d had regular TB and didn’t complete the required six months
of treatment or didn’t get sufficiently strong drugs, enabling
the bacteria to develop resistanc