Not the Multi Drug-Resistant, or the Extensively Drug-Resistant, but Totally Drug-Resistant. And in a country that doesn't have the clinical capabilities or widespread sophistication to diagnose and treat patients. And this isn't the first outbreak either.
Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.
Why this is bad news: TB is already one of the world’s worst killers, up there with malaria and HIV/AIDS, accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the WHO. At the best of times, TB treatment is difficult, requiring at least 6 months of pill combinations that have unpleasant side effects and must be taken long after the patient begins to feel well.
The first cases, as it turns out, were not these Indian ones, but an equally under-reported cluster of
15 patients in Iran in 2009
. They were embedded in a larger outbreak of 146 cases of MDR-TB, and what most worried the physicians who saw them was that the drug resistance was occurring in immigrants and cross-border migrants as well as Iranians: Half of the patients were Iranian, and the rest Afghan, Azerbaijani and Iraqi.
[A] condition in which patients do not respond to any TB medication... The mortality rate for this strain of the infectious disease is 100%... The patients, including a 13-year-old girl were diagnosed in October. A 31-year-old woman from Dharavi died in November... Doctors treating these patients say the absolute resistance is a result of the patients being prescribed wrong antibiotics by unspecialised doctors.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
