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No One Is Safe From XDR
TB SA1's 100% Kill Rate

By Adriana Stuijt
6-7-7
 
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND -- Top officials of the World Health Organization met privately yesterday in Geneva to review the lessons of the Speaker case in the USA. Dr. Mario Raviglione , director of WHO's Stop TB Department, said in an interview that the world's top TB specialists "have found a number of things that failed in the system" -- allowing Speaker to travel from country to country in Europe and eventually through Canada and into the United States. Speaker, who is now being treated at a Denver hospital, flew to France and Greece on public airline carriers last month even though infectious to fellow-passengers.
 
Raviglione said that "most critically was that this US case has revealed the worldwide lack of urgency in fighting drug-resistant tuberculosis."
 
Since XDR-TB was first identified in 2003 in South Africa, authorities have identified cases in 37 countries, including the United States. The cure-rate with the eight antibiotic drugs primarily used for TB treatment averages 66% on average in South Africa; the multiple-drug resistant strain cure rate is 30% -- but the XDR-TB epidemic now sweeping the country shows that it kills all its patients within 14 to 20 days: it has a zero cure rate.
 
'No one should feel safe in this world - TB spreads through the air and respects no border..."
 
"TB is not just a disease of the poorest people," Raviglione warned. "This is a disease that can hit everyone, even reach a lawyer in the US. It spreads through the air and respects no border. No one should feel safe in this world."
The latest available WHO statistics date from 2004:
 
Worldwide, an estimated 424,000 new cases of the only slightly less virulent Multiple-drug resistant TB (with a cure-rate of 30%) were diagnosed in 2004 -- a dramatic rise from the previous year's 273,000 cases.
 
Because many of these MDR-TB patients survive for years after diagnosis, specialists estimate that as many as 2 million people globally are already infected with some variety of drug- resistant TB -- and they will grow increasingly resistant to the entire range of TB-drugs and eventually die.
 
Note: Until 2006, South Africa's government had not notified WHO about its first XDR-TB outbreaks in 2003 and 2004 in the Western Cape -- when at least 200 Aids-infected patients had died of the uniquely South African SA-1 strain -- a mutation between the Human Immune-Deficiency-virus and the TB bacillus.

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