by Playfuls Staff |
7th September 2006
Medical experts began a two-day conference in South Africa Thursday to discuss the emergence of a new and highly drug resistent strain of tuberculosis (TB) that is feared to have spread beyond the area in the east of the country where it was recently first detected. [more]
The gathering comes just days after the World Health Organisation (WHO) called for stronger measures to tackle drug-resistant strains of the disease in the wake of a survey that has shown a newly identified TB threat - XDR-TB or Extensive Drug-Resistant TB - had been seen worldwide.
Officials from the WHO, the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and local and international medical experts were expected to contribute to discussions, the Johannesburg-based Business Day newspaper said Thursday.
Some 52 of 53 infected patients found to have been carrying the strain died, researchers said, reporting on a recent outbreak that was studied between January 2005 and March this year at a hospital in the Tugela Ferry district of the eastern South African province of KwaZulu Natal.
The XDR-TB strain has since also been identified at 12 other public hospitals in the province, according to Business Day.
Common TB becomes resistant to available medicines when patients fail to adhere to drugs over the six months it takes to treat the disease. But in the case of the XDR-TB strain which is spread in the same way - person to person - and causes the same symptoms as treatable TB, few of the patients studied had had the disease or been on the medication before.
At least 60 per cent of patients found to have been carrying the XDR-TB strain in the South African study had never had the disease before or taken TB medication, according to researchers.
Multi-drug resistance in TB patients has been a problem for some time in South Africa where around 250,000 new TB cases are diagnosed each year. The country's high HIV/AIDS infection rate is seen to make South Africa vulnerable in the latest fight against TB.
More than 5.5 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It is estimated that every day around 800 people die of opportunistic diseases - among these, TB - associated with the disease that depletes the body's immune system.
"In a country with such high prevalence levels of HIV, the emergence of XDR-TB is a nightmare," Dr Karin Weyer, director of TB operation and policy research at the South African Medical Research Council was quoted as saying in the Star newspaper on Thursday.
© 2006 DPA
