Incurable TB found in India

Winter Woman

Winter Woman

Well-Known Member
So this one has a 25% kill rate at the moment. If I remember my schooling TB can kill a huge amount of people in a short amount of time. Any medical people here that can give us some details?


Indian TB cases 'can't be cured'

Tuberculosis which appears to be totally resistant to antibiotic treatment has been reported for the first time by Indian doctors.


Concern over drug-resistant strains of TB is growing, with similar 'incurable' TB emerging in Italy and Iran.


Doctors in Mumbai said 12 patients had a "totally drug resistant" form of the infection, and three have died.


The Indian Health Ministry is investigating the cases and has sent a team of doctors to Mumbai.


TB is one of the world's biggest killers, second only to HIV among infectious diseases.


Normally a patient with TB is given a six to nine month course of antibiotics to eradicate it.


However, new strains of the bacterium have developed which are increasingly resistant to the antibiotics most commonly used to treat it.


Partially drug-resistant TB can now found in countries across the world, and "multi-drug resistant" strains affect countries such as Russia and China.


There's more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16592199
 
massah

massah

Well-Known Member
Just think if the HIV virus and TB bacteria were some way combined into an airborn version of HIV that immediately makes the host super sick...*shudder*
 
elenor.rigby

elenor.rigby

Active Member
serves our right, we need a reminder of our mortality, and could probably do with a few less billion people here on our small planet.. imho
 
medicalmaryjane

medicalmaryjane

Well-Known Member
tb is always incurable i thought. once you have it, it's in your body foreverr. that's why it would show up in a prick test even if it's latent?

i don't worry about these things. sometehing is going to get us all at some point. if u were really concerned, you wouldn't have children.
 
massah

massah

Well-Known Member
elenor.rigby said:
serves our right, we need a reminder of our mortality, and could probably do with a few less billion people here on our small planet.. imho
Click to expand...
Yes it's sad to say, but we could use a plague to reduce the population a tad...I'm not saying its a good idea for a disease to kill off a billion+ people, but we are going to run into population issues here in the next 20-30 years if people don't stop popping out kids like rabbits in developing countries...
 
doc111

doc111

Well-Known Member
medicalmaryjane said:
tb is always incurable i thought. once you have it, it's in your body foreverr. that's why it would show up in a prick test even if it's latent?

i don't worry about these things. sometehing is going to get us all at some point. if u were really concerned, you wouldn't have children.
Click to expand...
It always shows up in the "prick" test because that only tests for the presence of antibodies to tuberculosis. A chest X-ray or some other means is used for confirmation. False positives abound with those tests as well.:joint:
 
cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
This thread has taken a strange dark turn. TB is nasty, and weed doesn't help. The mycobacteria just get the munchies. cn
 
beardo

beardo

Well-Known Member
Im pretty sure they had incurable TB in russian prisons years ago, don't think it's really new, maybe it's different though I don't know, just remember hearing about it a long time ago
 
cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
Something tells me that Russian prisoners didn't have access to leading-edge health care. TB has never been cheap or easy or quick to treat. It's just nasty. cn
 
Carne Seca

Carne Seca

Well-Known Member
Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera -- a super bug -- into the Western Hemisphere for the first time.

The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 -- two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base.

"What scares me is that the strain from South Asia has been recognized as more virulent, more capable of causing severe disease, and more transmissible," said John Mekalanos, who chairs the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. "These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease."

More than 500,000 Haitians have been infected, and Mekalanos said a handful of victims who contracted cholera in Haiti have now turned up in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and in Boston, Miami and New York, but only in isolated cases.
 
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