Photo by John Carroll, November 2010
Chest x-ray: Pulmonary tuberculosis afflicting a 25 year old Haitian female
Multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is a treatable, airborne infectious disease that killed an estimated 1.5 million people between 2000 and 2009 — an annual rate 10times that of the H1N1 influenza virus.1,2
During this period, barely 0.5% of the estimated 5 million people who became ill with MDR tuberculosis received treatment with quality-assured second-line drugs. The rest continued to transmit resistant bacteria to others — in their homes, communities, workplaces, and other places where people congregate.
The results: an increase, in a number of locales, in the proportion of tuberculosis cases that were MDR; a frightening increase in the proportion of strains with broad-spectrum resistance, especially in areas with a high prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection; and, in some areas, an unraveling of hard-won progress in tuberculosis control.
New England Journal of Medicine, November 2010
2 comments:
Thanks for posting this great link to NEJM. I worked in northern Uganda on TB and is really a bad situation, I just specialized in Internal Medicine with a final elaborate on TB in resource limited settings.
My husband will come to Les Cayes to work (he is engeneer)on January 2011 and I will follow him and I will try to work a bit. Where do you work in Haiti exactly?
Thanks a lot, Dr.Federica Pozzi (Italy)
I forgot my email
pozzi.federica@hotmail.it
Thanks!!!
Dr.Federica Pozzi
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