Survey Finds Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis On Rise

March 16, 2004

Doctors need a new weapon in the fight against "super strains" of tuberculosis. A survey from the World Health Organization reveals there are 300,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant TB around the world each year.

"It is startling. The WHO has monitored drug-resistant tuberculosis for many years and we've known that it's creeping up. But it's even higher than before and in more countries," said Dr. Andrew Simor, an infectious disease expert at Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Centre.

Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, China and parts of Eastern Europe show the highest rates of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, followed closely by Ecuador and Israel. As many as 14 per cent of new TB cases are resistant to multiple drugs. Nearly 80 per cent of those are now "super strains" resistant to at least three of the four main drugs used to cure TB.

Tuberculosis is an airborne respiratory disease that kills about two million people every year.

One in three people around the world have it and the WHO estimates that unless control programs are strengthened, as many as a billion people could become infected by 2020.

"Globally, this is an enormous problem; it's one of the major killers worldwide," Simor said.

Meanwhile, drug companies have largely turned their back on the problem of tuberculosis, said Dr. Maria Freire, chief executive officer of the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, adding that the last viable TB drug developed by drug companies is at least 30 years old.

"It would be incomprehensible to accept that we would be treated with tools that are 30 to 40 years old. Yet we seem to think this is acceptable."

It takes six to nine months to treat tuberculosis with current drugs, which experts agree contributes to drug resistance since patients tend to quit treatment before they're fully cured.