- 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.
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- Raviglione said that "most critically was that this
US case has revealed the worldwide lack of urgency in fighting drug-resistant
tuberculosis."
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- 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.
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- 'No one should feel safe in this world - TB spreads through
the air and respects no border..."
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- "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:
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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