WHO: World must fight drug-resistant TB threat

Mar 31, 11:14 PM (ET)
By GILLIAN WONG

BEIJING (AP) - The World Health Organization's chief warned Wednesday
that emerging, hard-to-treat strains of tuberculosis are set to spiral
out of control and urged countries to fight the growing threat to
global public health.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told health ministers and senior
officials from 27 countries worst-affected by the new drug-resistant
strains of TB that they must make dramatic improvements in detecting
infections and build stronger health care systems.

"Call it what you may - a time-bomb or a powder keg," Chan said at the
opening of a three-day meeting on drug-resistant TB in Beijing. "Any
way you look at it, this is a potentially explosive situation."

TB is caused by germs that spread when a person with active TB coughs,
sneezes or speaks. It's ancient and treatable but now has evolved into
stronger forms: multidrug-resistant TB, which does not respond to two
top drugs, and extensively drug-resistant TB, which is virtually
untreatable.

Left unchecked, people with drug-resistant TB could potentially spread
the disease to others, creating an epidemic in the highly mobile
global economy. Even when detected, the infected have to switch to
more potent and expensive medicines, posing a problem for many
countries with underfunded health care systems.

Of the more than 9 million people around the world who contract
tuberculosis every year, about 500,000 get multi-drug resistant TB.

Nearly a quarter of them are in China, where legions of rural migrants
face an inadequate health care system. It is also a problem in India,
where rural health care is often poor and there is little control over
the sale of anti-TB drugs; Russia, which faces a shortage of qualified
medical staff and drugs; and South Africa, where the disease thrives
amid an AIDS epidemic that has weakened the immune systems of people
with HIV.

"I urge you to make the right policy decisions with appropriate
urgency," Chan said to the officials. "At a time of economic downturn,
the world simply cannot afford to let a threat of this magnitude,
complexity and cost spiral out of control."

Chan said less than 5 percent of estimated cases of drug-resistant TB
were being detected and fewer than 3 percent were being treated
according to WHO standards.

Countries attending the meeting are expected to start drawing up
five-year national plans to prevent and control the spread of
drug-resistant TB. Many countries have been slow to act, said Medecins
Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, in a statement
ahead of the Beijing meeting.

"The slow progress in treating people" was especially striking because
many of the at-risk countries have thriving economies, said MSF's Tido
von Schoen-Angerer. "They have the capacity to act, and need to make
this a priority and put people on treatment."

TB is usually treated in six months with a $20 cocktail of four
antibiotics, but its drug-resistant form takes up to two years to
fight. Chan said the cost of treating drug-resistant TB can be as much
as 200 times higher than normal TB.

Detecting drug-resistant TB quickly improves the chances a patient
will survive and lowers the risk that the disease mutates further into
an even more drug-resistant form of the disease.

Source: AP via My Way News
URL:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090401/D979DOAG0.html

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