Totally drug resistant (TDR) TB infections strikes India
At least a dozen people in India are infected with a strain of tuberculosis disease that is totally resistant to all antibiotics.
Disaster Calendar 2012 – January 17
[January 17, 2012] Mass die-offs resulting from human impact and the planetary response to the anthropogenic assault could occur by early 2016. SYMBOLIC COUNTDOWN: 1,520 Days Left to the ‘Worst Day’ in Human History
- Mumbai, India. At least 12 patients have acquired an “incurable” [Totally Drug-Resistant, TDR] form of the tuberculosis infection, and three have died, doctors at a Mumbai hospital reported.
- Previously, cases of partially drug-resistant TB have been reported worldwide, and multidrug resistant (MDR) TB strains in China, Iran, Italy and Russia.
- “We know one patient transmitted it to her daughter,” a researcher at the Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Center in Mumbai told New Scientist. “It’s estimated that on average, a tuberculosis patient infects 10 to 20 contacts in a year, and there’s no reason to suspect that this strain is any less transmissible,” he warned.
- TB is one of the world’s major killers among infectious diseases, claiming about 1.45 million lives from nearly 9 million reported cases in 2010, a death rate of about 1 in 6.
- Drug-resistant TB strains are rising worlwide.
- Some 110,000 cases of MDR-TB were reported in India in 2006.
- TDR-TB cases were first reported in Italy in 2007.
- “It’s very worrying, but kind of inevitable, given the gradual emergence of resistance,” said a TB researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “It’s like watching a slow-motion horror movie unfold.”
- The London 2012 Olympics and similar mass gatherings, “can be a hotbed of diseases from across the world, public health experts have warned.”
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