A new study has confirmed, once again, that hard-to-cure drug-resistant tuberculosis is a growing problem.
The study, published last week by The Lancet, measured which antibiotics worked or did not work against TB strains in 1,278 patients from Estonia, Latvia, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa and Thailand. Almost 44 percent showed resistance to at least one second-line drug.
Two years ago, the World Health Organization released a study with an equally pessimistic outlook.
About a third of the world has latent tuberculosis, experts estimate; it usually becomes active when an infected person’s immune system is depressed.
The most dangerous forms still tend to concentrate in alcoholics, prisoners, heavy smokers, the unemployed and homeless, people with H.I.V. — and particularly in people who previously had active TB but did not cure it. But now some patients, especially in former Soviet-bloc countries, are catching strains that already are resistant to some antibiotics.
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