The Beijing Chest Hospital was packed with people on a recent weekday morning. In the waiting area, Wang Chong, a migrant worker who has been fighting tuberculosis for several months, was facing a dilemma: Does he continue treatment that has already cost him more than US$5,000 or stop before his savings are wiped out?
It’s not only his health at stake. If Wang stops treatment prematurely, his tuberculosis is likely to morph into one of the new, hardier strains that resist the drugs he has been using and that pose a growing threat to global public health. Countries as diverse as China, Russia and South Africa are vulnerable, and the new strains have also appeared in the US.
“TB is now taking on a deadly new form — one that will spread further,” said Cornelia Hennig, the WHO’s TB program coordinator for China. “We can choose: Either we act now with rational and proven approaches, or we pay later with a worsening epidemic.”
PHOTO: AP
The WHO is trying to bring renewed vigor to the fight with a three-day meeting of health ministers from the worst-affected countries in Beijing starting tomorrow. Also attending are WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) and Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major contributor to research on global health problems. Countries are expected to draw up five-year plans to prevent and control the spread of drug-resistant TB.
TB is caused by germs that spread when a person with active TB coughs, sneezes or speaks. It’s ancient and treatable but now has evolved into stronger forms: multidrug-resistant TB, which does not respond to two top drugs, and extensively drug-resistant TB, which is virtually untreatable.
TB is usually treated in six months with a US$20 cocktail of four antibiotics, but its drug-resistant form takes up to two years to fight.
One of the culprits: Healthcare systems that lose track of patients who do not complete their courses of treatment, allowing the TB bacteria to develop resistance to normally potent medicines.
This is also a problem in India, where rural health care is often poor and there is little control over the sale of anti-TB drugs; Russia, which faces a shortage of qualified medical staff and drugs; and South Africa, where the disease thrives amid an AIDS epidemic that has weakened the immune systems of people with HIV.
An estimated half a million people in the world are already infected with drug-resistant TB, nearly a quarter of them in China.
Most are still waiting for help, which only increases the risk.
Less than 5 percent of people suffering from drug-resistant TB worldwide are properly treated, said Mark Harrington, executive director of Treatment Action Group, a US-based health advocacy group.
“So most of the people are going around coughing and spreading multidrug-resistant TB,” he said. “But most countries have not yet started to take it seriously.”
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