HEALTH:
Deadly New Strain of TB May Require Quarantines
Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Jan 22 (IPS) - Enforced quarantines may be needed in South Africa and elsewhere to bring a deadly, contagious and drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis under control, health experts say.

An outbreak of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province gained the attention of the World Health Organisation last year. Hundreds have been infected and the fatality rate is extremely high.

"The problem is a lot bigger than we know," said Jerome Amir Singh, an HIV/AIDS expert at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

"The high rates of normal TB and HIV infection in KZN ( KwaZulu-Natal) has created a very explosive disease cocktail," Singh told IPS from Durban.

In a survey of TB patients last year, 51 percent of the XDR patients had no prior TB treatment, suggesting that they had been newly infected by XDR-TB strains. In less than 25 days, 52 of the 53 XDR-TB patients died, a death rate unprecedented anywhere in the world, Singh and colleagues write in a policy paper "XDR-TB in South Africa: No Time for Denialism or Complacency" published Monday in the journal PLoS Medicine.

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