Monday, October 29, 2007

SA health plan may have caused new TB strain

...It will be at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from November 8 to 12.

The theme of the conference is "Confronting the challenges of HIV and MDR in TB prevention and care".

TB kills someone every 20 seconds - about 4 400 people every day around the world. Approximately 1,6 million died in 2005 alone, according to the latest estimates from the World Health Organisation.

More than a century after the discovery of the bacillus that causes TB, and 50 years after the discovery of antibiotics to treat the disease, TB is second only to HIV as the leading infectious killer of adults worldwide.

It is estimated about one-third of the world's population is infected.

Multidrug-resistant TB, known as MDR-TB, develops when TB patients cannot or do not take all the medication they are prescribed. More recently Extremely Drug-Resistant TB (XDR-TB) has been identified. There have been several hundred cases of XDR-TB in South Africa, and there is a very high death rate.

In the battle to contain XDR-TB in the Western Cape, last month the Cape Town High Court granted the Department of Health an order allowing authorities to force patients to stay in hospital until they had completed their treatment... Cape Argus



No comments: