Tuberculosis

A dangerous form of drug-resistant tuberculosis has reached its highest levels ever, accounting for at least 5% of all new TB cases worldwide and 15% to 22% of new cases in parts of the former Soviet Union and China, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. The WHO report, the first new survey of TB incidence in four years, estimates that there are nearly 500,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant TB, commonly known as MDR TB -- about 5% of the 9 million total new cases of TB each year.

Fearing that the global economic crisis could cause nations to renege on commitments to fight tuberculosis, new Nobel laureate and HIV co-discoverer Francoise Barre-Sinoussi warned that a drop in TB funding could wipe out gains made against AIDS because so many people suffer from both diseases. "We are at the period of success with antiretroviral treatment" for HIV, Barre-Sinoussi said Tuesday during a teleconference from the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

At least 83 cases of the most drug-resistant form of tuberculosis were diagnosed in the U.S. in the last 15 years, according to the most thorough accounting to date of the global scourge's national impact. But unlike what is happening in much of the developing world, new U.S. cases, already low, have declined sharply over that period, from a high of 18 in 1993 to two in 2007. Tuberculosis experts hailed the trend, reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

A highly drug-resistant form of tuberculosis has killed about 85% of South African HIV patients who have become infected, presenting one of the most worrisome problems in HIV and tuberculosis control, researchers reported Sunday. About 330 cases of so-called extensively drug-resistant, or XDR, tuberculosis have been verified in South Africa over the last year, said Karin Weyer of the South African Medical Research Council in Pretoria.

For the first time in modern history, the rate of infections in the global tuberculosis epidemic has leveled off and may be on the "threshold of decline," the World Health Organization announced today. The percentage of the world's population struck by TB peaked in 2004 and then held steady or even declined in 2005, according to the report, but the actual number of new cases increased to 8.8 million because of the growing world population. Dr.

Public health officials announced Thursday that tuberculosis cases in the state had dropped to historic lows last year, but they also expressed concern over small increases in 20 counties. State officials reported 2,781 new tuberculosis cases -- a nearly 50% drop from the state's peak in 1992. Los Angeles County, which accounts for a third of the cases in the state, continued its downward trend, reporting 933 cases last year.

His legs shackled and his wrists in handcuffs, Robert Daniels craned his neck past the armed Maricopa County sheriff's deputy and gazed at a sliver of daylight spilling through the hospital doors. "That's the first time I've seen sunlight in ... " Daniels' voice trailed off. He couldn't remember the last time. The 27-year-old has been confined to a sealed room in the Maricopa County Medical Center's jail ward since August.

Health authorities have begun notifying hundreds of people who may have been exposed to a Georgia man infected with a form of tuberculosis resistant to almost all drugs, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. The man traveled on two transatlantic flights in May and health officials are most worried about the airline crews and the passengers sitting around him, said CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding.

A Georgia man infected with a potentially deadly form of drug-resistant tuberculosis told a newspaper that health authorities in Atlanta never explicitly barred him from leaving on an overseas trip that may have exposed hundreds of people in the U.S., Europe and Canada. The man, who spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday, said health officials only said that they "preferred" he stay home in the Atlanta area. The man then reportedly left for Europe to get married.

A man infected with an extremely dangerous strain of tuberculosis was waved into the United States at a border crossing even after a routine check of his passport set off an urgent warning, authorities said Thursday.