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Deadly TB strain spreading across globe

London: World health officials on Tuesday night put out an unprecedented warning that deadly new strains of tuberculosis, virtually untreatable using the drugs currently available, appear to be spreading across the globe.

The new strains are known as extreme drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB. They have been identified and have killed people in several countries, including the United States and Eastern Europe, and they have recently been found in Africa, where they could swiftly put an end to all hope of containing the AIDS pandemic through treatment.

On Tuesday Paul Nunn, who heads the World Health Organisation's TB resistance team, said the situation was very serious. There are 9 million cases of TB in the world and the WHO estimates that 2 per cent of them could be XDR-TB.

Untreatable

``This is raising the spectre of something that we have been worried might happen for a decade — the possibility of virtually untreatable TB,'' said Dr. Nunn. Even in the United States, which has the best medicines available, a third of those who have been diagnosed with XDR-TB have died. In March, the Centres for Disease Control in the U.S. registered that there had been 64 cases of XDR-TB; 21 of those ended in death.

Significant numbers of cases have been confirmed in Latvia and Russia, but in many parts of the world, XDR-TB could be rife but unrecognised. One of the reasons the WHO is concerned is that tuberculosis spreads easily in confined places, such as aircraft. Multi-drug resistant TB strains — those that are resistant to the two basic, first-line drugs used to treat the disease — have spread everywhere, including to the U.K. Multi-drug resistant TB is increasingly common and is difficult and expensive to treat.

The patient must be given four out of the six existing second-line drugs. But the XDR-TB strains now appearing are a medical nightmare because at least three out of those six second-line drugs have no effect. There are no third-line drugs. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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