India, China, Russia and South Africa are at an increasiong risk of a tuberculosis crisis if the killer strain of drug resistant bacterias are not controlled, a senior World Health Organization officer has said.
All the four countries are fast developing and have a high percentage of impoverished population with poor hygeine and health care. Mario Raviglione, who heads WHO’s Stop TB department said, "Scenarios of apocalyptic nature are not, let's say, likely, but they might happen. They are not... impossible."
"Globally speaking about 96 percent of all TB cases are still treatable with the four drugs that we use in the standard regimen, 4 percent are multi-drug resistant ... but the worst case scenario is when this 4 percent becomes 50, 60, 70, 80 pe cent," he said on the sidelines of a TB Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
He said a new strain of multi drug resistant TB bacteria—MDR-TB and XDR-TB—are immune to all types of present anti-TB drugs and it’s high time strong measures are taken to control the spread of the bacteria. Older types of disease causing bacterias can still be controlled with the available drugs, however, it is the newer types of bacterias for which a new type of drug has to be developed. Raviglione said some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States or former Soviet Union have shown an MDR-TB incidence of up to 20 pe cent, while some European states showed resistance to all second-line TB .
He said Russia, China, India and South Africa were the four countries worst-hit with MDR-TB and XDR-TB, accounting for up to 60 per cent of the world's cases.
What has caused panic among health workers is that in some countries, TB patients were also carriers of HIV and this makes the task of treating them absolutely difficult. "The XDR epidemic has simply exposed the limitations of the current tools used to control TB. New diagnostics and hopefully a new vaccine are fundamental items that we have to push through as a global community," Raviglione said
Source : Biospectrumasia
