Picking Up the Pace — Scale-Up of MDR Tuberculosis Treatment Programs
Open Access
- 4 November 2010
- journal article
- editorial
- Published by Massachusetts Medical Society in New England Journal of Medicine
- Vol. 363 (19), 1781-1784
- https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1010023
Abstract
Multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is a treatable, airborne infectious disease that killed an estimated 1.5 million people between 2000 and 2009 — an annual rate 10 times that of the H1N1 influenza virus.1,2 During this period, barely 0.5% of the estimated 5 million people who became ill with MDR tuberculosis received treatment with quality-assured second-line drugs. The rest continued to transmit resistant bacteria to others — in their homes, communities, workplaces, and other places where people congregate. The results: an increase, in a number of locales, in the proportion of tuberculosis cases that were MDR; a frightening increase in the proportion of strains with broad-spectrum resistance, especially in areas with a high prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection; and, in some areas, an unraveling of hard-won progress in tuberculosis control.1Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- HIV Infection and Multidrug‐Resistant Tuberculosis—The Perfect StormThe Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2007
- Tuberculosis in New York City — Turning the TideNew England Journal of Medicine, 1995