Drug-resistant TB 'rife' in
The proportion of TB sufferers in
The study, conducted by Chinese and Dutch researchers, shows that the prevalence was 9.3 per cent compared with global estimates of 4.8 per cent. The authors say the figures are "worryingly high".
Patients with MDR-TB have to be treated with costly, toxic and less effective drugs — and infected patients are less likely to survive treatment.
"The inadequate use of anti-TB drugs in public hospitals, lack of supervision of treatment, poor drug-management and absence of infection control measures in hospitals," are all possible factors, the authors wrote in their paper.
The highest resistance rates were found in
Zheng Suhua, an epidemiologist at the Beijing Tuberculosis Institute, agrees with the conclusions.
"It hasn't been proved yet, but prevalence of drug resistant TB is probably affected by regional factors. Different strains make different types of drug resistant TB."
But in the case of
"AIDS patients are very easily infected by TB, and about one third of them die from it," Zheng told SciDev.Net. Comparing different provincial rates is of limited use, however, because the data span eight years, said co-author Zhao Yanlin from the National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory in the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.