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Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa—five developing nations with high rates of infectious diseases—
have announced they will work together to fight against drug-resistant
tuberculosis (TB). The epidemic has contributed to hundreds of thousands of
deaths around the world each year. The fatality rate for drug-resistant TB is
approximately 50 percent. Reports say that the epidemic is worsening, including
the February 4 news that a highly-anticipated TB vaccine trial, a study of the
first new TB vaccine in 90 years, failed to achieve its desired results. The
World Health Organization (WHO) cautions that the rise of TB strains resistant
to antibiotic treatment signifies a serious global health threat, especially in
developing countries.
According to WHO, in 2011 almost 60
percent of the estimated 310,000 cases of multidrug-resistant TB occurred in
India, China, and Russia. WHO states that these countries must strengthen their
efforts to overcome the global epidemic. Multidrug-resistant TB is a form of
the disease that does not respond to the two most powerful anti-TB medicines.
The worldwide worsening of drug-resistant TB has been made known in the last
year, despite progress in reducing incidence of regular TB. An Indian doctor
reported early last year that a patient had become so drug- resistant that none
of the 12 top TB medicines were effective.
Even though the five countries’
economies are flourishing and there is more pressure on them to use their own
funds to address their particular country’s health issues, treating
drug-resistant forms of TB is much more complicated and costly than treating
regular TB. Experts warn that drug-resistant TB may be just the beginning of
the problem, as other diseases become resistant to antibiotics and new drug
development is not fast enough to replace them. In the United States, the Food
and Drug Administration has attempted to relax its authorization process for
new antibiotics to spur the development of new drugs, but antibiotic development
in the United States has continued to stall.
The Friends of AIDS Foundation is
dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and
empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV
virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.
TOGETHER WE REMAIN STRONG!
