Quick spread of drug-resistant TB is cause for concern

Published: Friday December 12, 2008

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Yerevan - A recent WHO report, Anti-Tuberculosis Drug Resistance in the World, which is based on information collected between 2002 and 2006 on 90,000 TB patients in 81 countries found that XDR-TB has been recorded in 45 countries.

Based on this survey, WHO estimates that there are nearly half a million new cases of MDR TB, or about 5 percent of all new global TB cases (approximately 9 million). The highest rate was recorded in Baku, Azerbaijan, where nearly a quarter of all new TB cases (22.3 percent) were reported as MDR TB. The highest incidences of MDR-TB among new TB cases: 19.4 percent in Moldova; 16 percent in Donetsk in Ukraine; 15 percent in Tomsk Oblast in the Russian Federation; and 14.8 percent in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. These rates surpass the highest levels of drug resistance published in the last WHO report in 2004. The situation is also widespread in China.