GENEVA - THE World Health Organisation warned on Thursday that lethal multidrug resistant tuberculosis is becoming a serious threat to global health with just a small proportion of cases diagnosed.
In its latest report on the hard-to-treat multidrug resistant forms of TB, the WHO said it had documented the highest proportion of such cases of tuberculosis ever at about five per cent.
It estimated that 440,000 people worldwide had multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in 2008 and that a third of them died, out of 9.4 million new cases of tuberculosis each year.
Almost half the drug resistant cases were estimated to have occurred in China and India. One-quarter of all TB patients in northwestern Russia were found to have the multidrug resistant form, a proportion never seen before, according to the report.
'We confirm in that report that MDR-TB is really a serious threat to global health,' said co-author Matteo Zignol. 'We estimated approximately half a million cases every year. And only a small proportion of them, seven per cent, get a diagnoses and treatment,' he added.
Experience with systematic testing for multidrug resistant strains in two Russia regions, Tomsk and Orel, had however shown that a rapid increase could be reversed, the UN health agency said. But 58 countries have reported the lethal and worst form of the disease - extensively drug resistant XDR-TB. 'XDR-TB is virtually untreatable. In the best hands, the cure rate is above 60 per cent. In the vast majority of cases, there is nothing to offer,' co-author Ernesto Jaramillo told journalists. -- AFP
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