First cases of totally drug resistant TB in India, one dead
This is as scary as it can get. The PD Hinduja hospital detected four people with total drug resistant (TDR) tuberculosis (TB), the first such cases in the country till November last year. In the last two months, eight others have been detected with TDR-TB.
Of the 12 patients, a 31-year-old woman from Dharavi died in November 2011. She underwent a surgery to remove one of the infected lungs before she passed away. Doctors say the condition is a result of inappropriate treatment of TB patients in private clinics. A person with TB can infect 15 people a year and cause an epidemic, according to doctors.
“Our last study on prescribing practices of private practitioners in the treatment of TB patients showed that only five of 106 private practitioners wrote the correct prescription for treating TB,” said Dr Zarir F Udwadia, chest physician at PD Hinduja Hospital who led the study. The hospital detected extreme drug resistant (XDR) TB cases five years ago.
Till November 2011, the hospital got four TB patients resistant to all first-line (Isoniazid, Rifampicin, Ethambutol, Pyrazinamide and Streptomycin) and second-line (Ofloxacin, Moxifloxacin, Kanamycin, Amikacin, Capreomycin, Para-aminosalicylic acid and Ethionamide) drugs.
“After thoroughly checking their prescriptions, we found that three of them had received erratic and unsupervised second-line drugs. They were often given in incorrect doses by multiple private practitioners to cure their multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB,” Dr Udwadia said. “The mortality rate of MDR, XDR and TDR-TB is 30%, 60% and 100% respectively.”
Well, fuck.
When rich people start getting TDR-TB, that’s when we will start taking tuberculosis seriously. Until then, TDR-, XDR-, MDR- and plain old drug-sensitive TB will ravage poor people, people who live in low- and middle-income countries, and millions will die every year, and no one will give a shit. When I tell people what I do, they’re often surprised that TB still exists; it’s not their fault, but still. There are fingers pointing in a thousand different directions but at the end of the day it means people are dying a horrible death.
