Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Wall Street Journal - September 9, 2006
Betsy McKay, betsy.mckay@wsj.com and Marilyn Chase, marilyn.chase@wsj.com
At a two-day meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, that ended Friday, officials from the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the South African Medical Research Council said they would push to implement faster diagnostic tests and improve surveillance for the killer strain in areas where the prevalence of TB is high.
The full extent of the current outbreak of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, is unknown. The outbreak was originally detected by researchers after it ripped through a rural clinic in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, killing 52 of 53 infected patients. Most of the affected patients had HIV/AIDS. At the conference this past week, researchers said they have now found the strain in more than 100 people in 28 hospitals.
XDR-TB is all but impossible to treat under currently available regimens. While it has been detected in other parts of the world, public-health officials are particularly concerned about its emergence now in southern Africa, where large swathes of the population are infected with HIV. HIV infection promotes the activation of latent TB, while TB bacteria stimulate the progression of AIDS.
Paul Nunn, head of the WHO's TB drug-resistance team, said that among measures to combat the outbreak, local officials would survey high-risk patients to determine how widespread the killer strain is. The CDC and South African Medical Research Council also are training lab technicians in a liquid-based culture technique that cuts in half the time to diagnose TB, to between two to five weeks.
Other measures include urging local health officials to get more HIV patients on antiretroviral treatments, which will help to reduce their risk of TB.
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