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Saturday, January 14, 2012

India : The new, deadly TB strain may be more widespread

Via Indian Express :

" The occurrence of a new, deadly variant of the TB causing bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, that is resistant to all currently available lines of treatment — researchers at the P D Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre at Mumbai say they have detected 12 such cases recently in India — could be more widespread.

According to a yet-to-be published paper by a research group in Bangalore’s St John’s Research Institute, among 100 TB patients they had randomly selected for drug susceptibility studies, six were found having the ‘total’ drug resistant (TDR) strain of the disease. Besides, 30 among the 100 patients were found to be first line multi-drug resistant (MDR) cases and 13 second-line extensive drug resistant (XDR) cases.

“Our data is pending publication. We have stored the drug resistant varieties in our bio-repository to show that they exist,” says Dr John Kenneth, Professor and Head, Infectious Diseases, St John’s Research Institute.

The emergence of the TDR-type strain means that TB could be more dangerous than HIV because the spread of HIV can be controlled with the control of risky behaviour and life can be prolonged with treatment."

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