Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has reached "epidemic" levels in many ex-Soviet nations, and is widespread in several provinces of China, according a new global assessment released Thursday.
Data on more than 90,000 patients in 83 countries covering the period 2002-2007 showed that one-in-nine of the approximately nine million new cases of tuberculosis each year failed to respond to at least one anti-TB drug.
The rates of MDR-TB -- defined as resistant to at least two frontline medications -- were between seven and 22 percent in nine countries from the former Soviet Union, including 19 percent in Moldova and 22 percent in Baku, Azerbaijan. Overall, nearly a fifth of all TB cases in Eastern Europe were drug resistant. "The countries of the former Soviet Union are facing a serious and widespread epidemic with the highest prevalence of MDR-TB ever reported in 13 years of global data collection," the study concluded.
In most rich nations, including France, Britain, the Netherlands and New Zealand, the prevalence of drug resistant TB was one percent or lower. All told, more than half-a-million cases of MDR-TB have emerged since 2006, according to the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet. Half of them were in China and India.
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http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Drug-resistant_TB_rampant_in_ex-USSR_China_study_999.html
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