http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
This looks worse even than the predictions of what bird flu might do if it acquired the ability to be transmitted human to human.
On a day when there are lots of discussions about fear-mongering using terrorists, here's something that is REALLY scary......it's right up there with the ecological collapse that will accompany climate change....and it is happening NOW.
World health officials last 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.
Drug resistant TB has been around a long time, and this development was absolutely predictable, so on a certain level, the development of a "nightmare" TB strain is not a shock
In the early 19th century TB was rampant, responsible for up to one in four of all deaths in England. It spread through tiny particles released when an infected patient coughed or sneezed. Public health improvements cut the number of cases in the early 20th century, but not until the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1946 was the disease treatable.
Hopes of eradicating TB faded when drug-resistant strains emerged in the 1980s, followed by strains resistant to multiple drugs.
However, this description reminds me of the accounts of the 1918 flu pandemic............with the difference that the TB isn't just going to mutate into a less dangerous strain after a few months.
"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 US 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 UK. 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.
The spectre of a new untreatable plague has concentrated minds because of the identification of a cluster of cases in KwaZulu Natal, in South Africa. Scientists ran tests on people with tuberculosis in a rural part of the region. They studied 544 patients and found that 221 had TB strains against which the two common drugs, rifampicin and isoniazid, had no effect.
Finding such a high rate of multi-drug resistant TB was serious enough. But they also discovered that 53 of the patients had XDR-TB - and 52 of them died within an average of 25 days.
Finally, the multiplicative effect of this TB strain and AIDS on societies where AIDS is endemic looks like an utter disaster.
I'd like to get some discussion of this, especially by folks like CTDem, who have been following the avian flu risk