Happy Tubercular Saturday...
This was taken from the World Wide Words newsletter.
XDR-TB
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This abbreviation has been in use only since March, when it was introduced into medical language by the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.
It appeared again this week as the result of what one newspaper called "an unprecedented warning" by the WHO.
XDR-TB expands to "extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis" (though some reports have "extreme drug-resistant") and refers to cases that are unresponsive to almost all the drugs available to treat them. The International World AIDS Conference in Toronto in August heard of a group of cases in rural KwaZulu-Natal among patients also infected with HIV; a significant number of XDR-TB cases have been reported worldwide, not associated with Aids.
It's a development of the situation that arose more than a decade ago when MDR-TB ("multi-drug resistant tuberculosis") emerged, a form resistant to the two first-line treatment drugs.
Experts fear that we may soon see an untreatable form of TB, a return to the time before streptomycin was discovered in 1946.
* Daily Telegraph, 7 Sep. 2006: The combination of Aids and XDR-TB found in a quarter of patients in Natal carries a mortality rate of 100 per cent.
* New York Times, 5 Sep 2006: Dr. Mario C. Raviglione, who directs
the World Health Organization's tuberculosis program, said in an
interview that "nobody at the moment can be considered an expert" about the XDR-TB problem. But he said that the XDR-TB situation is "extremely scary."
***
So...while governments are looking at Avian flus and viruses and diseases born of other species, we humans are germinating the next threat in our own bodies.
Shame that the Department of Health and Human Services doesn't spend money like NASA does...well they do, but their results just aren't as spectacular.
XDR-TB
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This abbreviation has been in use only since March, when it was introduced into medical language by the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.
It appeared again this week as the result of what one newspaper called "an unprecedented warning" by the WHO.
XDR-TB expands to "extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis" (though some reports have "extreme drug-resistant") and refers to cases that are unresponsive to almost all the drugs available to treat them. The International World AIDS Conference in Toronto in August heard of a group of cases in rural KwaZulu-Natal among patients also infected with HIV; a significant number of XDR-TB cases have been reported worldwide, not associated with Aids.
It's a development of the situation that arose more than a decade ago when MDR-TB ("multi-drug resistant tuberculosis") emerged, a form resistant to the two first-line treatment drugs.
Experts fear that we may soon see an untreatable form of TB, a return to the time before streptomycin was discovered in 1946.
* Daily Telegraph, 7 Sep. 2006: The combination of Aids and XDR-TB found in a quarter of patients in Natal carries a mortality rate of 100 per cent.
* New York Times, 5 Sep 2006: Dr. Mario C. Raviglione, who directs
the World Health Organization's tuberculosis program, said in an
interview that "nobody at the moment can be considered an expert" about the XDR-TB problem. But he said that the XDR-TB situation is "extremely scary."
***
So...while governments are looking at Avian flus and viruses and diseases born of other species, we humans are germinating the next threat in our own bodies.
Shame that the Department of Health and Human Services doesn't spend money like NASA does...well they do, but their results just aren't as spectacular.
posted by Mark "Puff" Anderson | 8:35 AM
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