Dire Warnings About New Tuberculosis From Russia

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Dire Warnings About New Tuberculosis From Russia

Modesto Bee Online (12/31/98)
Moran, Mark

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is sweeping through Russia, and health experts note that the country's economic collapse will likely contribute to continued inadequate treatment of the disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Dr. Richard O'Brien, one of 10 officials who traveled to Russia earlier this year to assess the problem, has called the outbreak possibly "the most severe case of multidrug-resistant TB ever documented." The doctors termed the epidemic "a direct global public health threat" and noted that while the immediate risk to Americans is small, international travel and immigration virtually guarantee that U.S. doctors will encounter MDR-TB from Russia. According to Dr. Michael Kimerling of the University of Alabama in Birmingham, 109,000 new cases of infectious TB were recorded in Russia in 1997, with an incidence rate of 74 per 100,000 people. Among civilians, the rate of drug-resistant TB could be as high as 7 percent of all new infections. In Russian prisons, incidence of infectious TB is thought to be about 4,000 cases per 100,000 population, with up to 20 percent of those infections multidrug resistant.

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