WASHINGTON — China faces a “serious epidemic” of drug-resistant tuberculosis according to the first-ever nationwide estimate of the size of the problem there, said a new US-published study.
“In 2007, one third of the patients with new cases of tuberculosis and one half of the patients with previously treated tuberculosis had drug-resistant disease,” said the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Even more, the prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB in new cases (5.7 percent) was nearly twice the global average, said the study.
Using World Health Organization figures as a basis for comparison, “China has the highest annual number of cases of MDR tuberculosis in the world — a quarter of the cases worldwide,” it added.
“China has a serious epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis.”
The data came from a survey of more than 4,600 Chinese people who were recently diagnosed or treated for TB.
Patients for the study were treated at local TB clinics, not hospitals, and the survey was conducted by the National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory (NTRL) of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control.
According to an accompanying editorial by Johns Hopkins University infectious disease specialist Richard Chaisson, the growth of drug-resistant TB presents an “enormous challenge.”
Even more concerning was the finding that most of the 110,000 drug-resistant cases were in people newly diagnosed with the disease, suggesting that the virulent bacteria are being transmitted from person to person and not developing solely as a result of a person prematurely stopping treatment.
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