`Virtually untreatable' TB strain spreads
A deadly disease is said to lack cure
PARIS -- The spread of a new, highly resistant form of tuberculosis that is ``virtually untreatable" is causing alarm among international health officials who say that it has now been identified in ``all regions of the world," according to the World Health Organization.
For two decades, health officials have been concerned about the steady rise in drug-resistant tuberculosis. The increase has forced them to rely on more expensive and prolonged treatments to achieve a cure, increasing the cost of treatment 100-fold.
But the new strains, called extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, cannot be treated at any cost. In many patients, particularly those with HIV or AIDS, the emergence of such strains has transformed tuberculosis, generally a slow, chronic lung disease, into a rapid assassin.
``With XDR-TB we have very few options left -- all we can even try are very old, very ineffective drugs," said Dr. Karin Weyer, director of the TB Unit at the South African Research Council. ``For many people, there is no option."
This week, specialists from the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet in Johannesburg to plot strategies to contain the disease.
Officials from the World Health Organization declined to discuss the topic until after the conference.
In one recent TB outbreak among 544 people in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, most of whom were HIV-positive, 221 had resistant TB, and 53 of those cases involved XDR strains.
Of those 53 cases, 52 patients have died, including many who were otherwise getting the most advanced therapy for AIDS.
And the problem of extreme resistance is not limited to Africa or to patients with HIV/AIDS. When the US Centers for Disease Control asked tuberculosis labs worldwide last year to take a look at specimens for XDR-TB, the results of their work were alarming.
In a paper published this summer in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, researchers reported that 15 percent of samples in South Korea had extreme drug resistance, as did 19 percent in Latvia, and 14 percent in the East European/West Asia region. In the United States, 4 percent of samples presented XDR symptoms.
``XDR-TB has emerged worldwide as a threat to public health and TB control, raising concerns of a future epidemic of virtually untreatable disease," the researchers said.
Extremely drug-resistant TB arises when a strain of tuberculosis with a less severe form of resistance is unrecognized, or is otherwise treated inadequately or incompletely.
