Have we passed the tipping point? Drug resistant tuberculosis could kill millions

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that multidrug resistant tuberculosis (TB) is reaching a tipping point, with about 480,000 new cases having occurred this year.

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Multidrug resistant TB has emerged in recent years, caused by TB patients being given the wrong medicines to treat the disease, the wrong doses of medicine, or even failing to fully complete their treatment.

Multidrug resistant TB is now posing a critical global health threat.

Nine million people contracted tuberculosis in 2013, and 3.5% of these people were diagnosed with a strain that was drug-resistant to some extent. Drug-resistant TB cases are much harder to treat, and more alarmingly, have much lower recovery rates.

"There are severe epidemics in some regions, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," a U.N. health agency annual assessment of the global burden of TB revealed.

Some TB strains that are incredibly drug-resistant have been reported in 100 countries around the world, these include the XDR-TB and MDR-TB strains.

A tuberculosis expert with Doctors Without Borders, Grania Brigden, said that them "alarming spread of drug-resistant TB from person to person in the former Soviet Union is of critical concern, along with the growth in MDR-TB and XDR-TB cases."

"Access to proper treatment is drastically low: only one in five people with multi drug-resistant TB receives treatment; the rest are left to die, increasing the risk to their families and communities and fueling the epidemic."

Tuberculosis causes night sweats, persistent coughing, weight loss and blood in saliva. The disease is spread via close contact with an infected person. Of all the current infectious diseases, only AIDS kills more people.

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