London (Reuters) – on the eve of New year of 2004, after months losing weight and suffering episodes of fever, night sweating and lack of air, student Anna Watterson was transferred to the hospital coughing blood.
Then the diagnosis he received from tuberculosis ( TB) – an ancient disease associated with the poverty-especially because the young man was a student of wealthy lawyer who lived in the busy British capital was strange.
Nevertheless, at that time was a relief, as she herself has, know finally what had kept her sick for so long.
But when the infection of Watterson refused to respond to prolonged antibiotic treatment that doctors had indicated to combat, his relief turned into terror.
After six weeks taking medication that had not succeeded, Watterson was informed that he had “Multiple drug-resistant TB”, or MDR-TB, and faced months of isolation with a regime of injectable drugs that left with nausea, bruises and unable to leave and being in the Sun.
“my friends were really shocked,” said Watterson. “most of them only had heard of TB to read novels of the Victorian era”, he added.
Tuberculosis is often considered a disease of past eras, evoking women and impoverished children of the 18th and 19th centuries that slowly died from a disease known as “white plague” in the wealthy West.
But the speed with which grow TB cases resistant to medications in some of the world’s richest cities, as well as in Africa and Asia, is making history again.
London has been called the “European capital of tuberculosis” and a quite frightening recent study documents about new cases in India of what they call “totally resistant to medicines” TB and suggest that the modern history of this condition could worsen much.
“Can stop this genius out of the lamp.” “Because once you do, do not know how to control TB”, said Ruth McNerney, expert on tuberculosis of the school of hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London.
International alarm
The TB is a bacterial infection that destroys the lung tissue of patients, which makes them coughing and sneezing, and expand the germs in the air. Anyone with TB activates can easily infect 10 to 15 others per year.
In 2010, 8.8 million people had active TB and the World Health Organization (who) has provided more than 2 million human beings to contract the multi-drug-resistant TB until 2015.
The worldwide rate of TB death is currently between two to three persons per minute.
For all this, little surprise that seemingly impossible to treat in India cases have generated international alarm.
Who set a special meeting to discuss whether the emergence of strains of TB that appear to be resistant to all known measures deserves a new kind of definition as “Totally drug-resistant TB”, or TDR-TB.
If so, this would add a new level to evolution with the years of normal TB – which is curable with six months of antibiotic treatment-, TB (MDR-TB) multi-drug-resistant and highly resistant to multiple drugs (XDR-TB) TB.
Frustrating most of this advance in Lucica Ditiu of the Global Plan to Stop TB in the who, is that all drug-resistant TB “is a disease completely man-made”.
As other bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis can evolve to combat the obstacles that you antibiotics. How many more treatments are administered to patients and more if they are not completed, stronger and expanded becomes the resistance of these pathogens.
“medical, the health workers, nurses, all health care systems have produced the MDR-TB.” “Is not a bacterium that comes from nature,” said Ditiu.
“is not a spontaneous mutation.” “It arose because patients were wrongly treated: with medications of poor quality, or without sufficient drugs, or with insufficient control so not finished the course of treatment”, added.
/Por Kate Kelland /
