Health Market Science

A recent report from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases documented four cases in India involving patients infected with a strain of tuberculosis that is resistant to all antibiotics typically used to treat the disease. News sources in India report there have been at least 12 people diagnosed with the drug-resistant lung disease.

Officials fear that this new strain of tuberculosis could spread rapidly, aided by no developed treatment to combat the disease. Zarir Udwadia of the Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre and co-author of the study, said a tuberculosis patient, on average, infects 10 to 20 people they come in contact with, and the new drug-resistant strain is expected to be just as contagious as other strains of TB.

"Short of quarantining them in hospitals with isolation facilities till they become non-infectious - which is not practical or possible - there is nothing else one can do to prevent transmission," Udwadia told the New Scientist.

TB-causing bacteria are known for their ability to become resistant to many types of antibiotics developed to treat the disease. Researchers are now discovering the bacteria is resistant to all available antibiotics. However, this is not the first time TB has been found to be resistant to treatment. In 2007, two patients were diagnosed with the disease in Italy, and 15 patients were identified with resistant strains in Iran in 2009, the source reported.

USA Today reported tuberculosis is an airborne disease that is typically transmitted from one patient to another through personal contact, but is not as contagious as the flu. However, most of the cases of the drug-resistant TB were not sourced from person-to-person contact, but were the result of mutations that occurred in poorly treated patients that were previously diagnosed with TB.

In fact, the international public health community is debating whether or not the strain of TB should be labeled as totally drug resistant. The World Health Organization considers the new cases of TB to be called extensively drug-resistant. But Dr. Paul Nunn, a coordinator at the WHO's Stop TB Department in Geneva, told the source there is proof that cases of TB that have virtually no treatment available do exist.

The hospital in India that reported the new strain of TB tested a dozen medicines on the patients, none of which had any effect on the disease. A TB expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed these findings from the comprehensive assessment of treatments and said the TB strain appears to be totally resistant to all available drugs.

"It is concerning," said Dr. Kenneth Castro, director of the CDC's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. "Anytime we see something like this, we better get on top of it before it becomes a more widespread problem."

The source reported that tuberculosis is typically cured by a six to nine month treatment of antibiotics. If the treatment is interrupted or the dosage is reduced, TB-causing bacteria can linger in the human body, and possibly mutate to form a strain of TB that is stronger and more resilient to drugs it was exposed to during the treatment. This allows the disease to evolve and become more challenging and expensive to treat.