Fear-Resistance: How Worried Should We Be about "Totally Drug-Resistant" Tuberculosis?
Monday, January 30, 2012 - 08:01
in Health & Medicine
A few weeks ago a clinic in Mumbai claimed to have identified a dozen patients with a strain of tuberculosis (TB) resistant to all known treatments. TB is a highly contagious lung infection that kills about 1.5 million people each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), so the development of a totally untreatable form of the disease would be cause for alarm. "It conveys that there is no hope, that not a single drug works," says Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal. [More]