Maryn McKenna

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Highest Rates Ever Recorded of Multi-Drug-Resistant TB

February 16, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

On the heels of the news of totally drug-resistant (TDR) TB being identified in India — and disavowed, unfortunately, by the Indian government — the World Health Organization has released an update on the background situation of drug-resistant TB around the world.

The news is not good. Drug-resistant TB is at the highest rates ever recorded.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Africa, Europe, india, Russian, Science Blogs, TB, TDR, Who

TDR-TB: The Indian Government Denies It

January 29, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

An update to the news two weeks ago of totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, TDR-TB, being identified in India (and earlier in Italy and Iran): The Indian government has announced that it doesn’t exist, and is putting pressure on the physicians who identified it to say they made a mistake.

Because, of course, that’s going to keep a disease from spreading.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, india, NDM-1, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

Totally Drug-Resistant TB: A Patient Is Missing

January 14, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There was a lot of interest in  in TDR-TB Friday; both The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC and Science Friday kindly asked me to be on to talk about it. While I was waiting for the phone link to Science Friday to become live, an alarming bulletin arrived in my e-mail. The early-warning list ProMED reported that the existence of two additional cases of TDR-TB have been disclosed, in Bangalore, 600 miles from Mumbai where the first known Indian cases were identified. The patients, a 56-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, had been coming to a hospital for directly observed administration of their TB for more than two years; they were initially recognized as MDR-TB patients, with disease that was highly resistant but not untreatable, but were not getting better. For the past two weeks, though, the man has not shown up, and no one appears to know where he is.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, india, Iran, Italy, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

Totally Resistant TB: Earliest Cases in Italy

January 12, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A follow-up to Monday’s post on the recognition in India of totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, TDR-TB: The fantastic early-warning list ProMED points out that the earliest recorded cases of TDR were not the current 12 known cases in Mumbai or the 15 cases in Iran in 2009, but rather two women from Italy who died in 2003 after  being sick for several years.

It’s a sad story that was briefly recounted in 2007 in the journal EuroSurveillance, published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, india, Iran, Italy, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

India Reports Completely Drug-Resistant TB

January 9, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Well, this is a bad way to start the year.

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.

News of some of the cases was published Dec. 21 in an ahead-of-print letter to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which just about everyone missed, including me. (But not, thankfully, the hyper-alert global-health blogger Crawford Kilian, to whom I hat-tip.) That letter describes the discovery and treatment of four cases of TDR-TB since last October. On Saturday, the Times of India disclosed that there are actually 12 known cases just in one hospital, the P. D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre; in the article, Hinduja’s Dr. Amita Athawale admits, “The cases we clinically isolate are just the tip of the iceberg.” And as a followup, the Hindustan Times reported yesterday that most hospitals in the city — by extension, most Indian cities — don’t have the facilities to identify the TDR strain, making it more likely that unrecognized cases can go on to infect others.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, india, Resistance, Science Blogs, TB, TDR

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