First drug-resistant TB case in US found

Lantana, Texas: It started with a cough, a cool-season hack that refused to go away.

Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4am, Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.

I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad". It was really bad, and not just for him.

Doctors say Juarez's incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — this country's first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis.

The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.

Juarez's strain — so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB — has never before been seen in the United States, according to Dr David Ashkin, one of the nation's leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.

"These are the ones we really fear because I'm not sure how we treat them," Ashkin said.

Forty years ago, the world thought it had conquered TB and any number of other diseases through the new wonder drugs: Antibiotics.

US Surgeon General William H. Stewart announced it was "time to close the book on infectious diseases and declare the war against pestilence won."

Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet — TB, malaria and HIV among them — are mutating at an alarming rate, hitchhiking their way in and out of countries. The reason: Overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to have saved us.

Just as the drugs were a manmade solution to dangerous illness, the problem with them is also manmade. It is fuelled worldwide by everything from counterfeit drugmakers to the unintended consequences of giving drugs to the poor without properly monitoring their treatment.

This is what AP found:

• In Cambodia, scientists have confirmed the emergence of a new drug-resistant form of malaria, threatening the only treatment left to fight a disease that already kills 1 million people a year.
   
• In Africa, new and harder-to-treat strains of HIV are being detected in about 5 per cent of new patients. HIV drug resistance rates have shot up to as high as 30 per cent worldwide.

n In the United States, drug-resistant infections killed more than 65,000 people last year, more than prostate and breast cancer combined. More than 19,000 people died from a staph infection alone that has been eliminated in Norway, where antibiotics are stringently limited.

"Drug resistance is starting to be a very big problem. In the past, people stopped worrying about TB, and it came roaring back. We need to make sure that doesn't happen again," said Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, who was himself infected with tuberculosis while caring for drug-resistant patients at a New York clinic in the early 1990s.

The disease

Ancient menace

Tuberculosis has been detected in the spine of a 4,400-year-old Egyptian mummy. In the 1600s, it was known as the great white plague because it turned patients pale. In later centuries, as it ate through bodies, they called it "consumption". By 1850, an estimated 25 per cent of Europeans and Americans were dying of tuberculosis, often in isolated sanatoriums such as Holley where they were sent for rest and nutrition.

Then in 1944 a critically ill TB patient was given a new miracle antibiotic and immediately recovered. New drugs quickly followed. They worked so well that by the 1970s in the United States, it was assumed the disease was a problem of the past.

Once public health officials decided TB was gone, the disease was increasingly missed or misdiagnosed. Without public funding, it made a comeback among the poor. Then immigration and travel flourished, breaking down invisible walls that had contained TB.

Drug resistance emerged worldwide. Doctors treated TB with the wrong drug combinations. Clinics ran out of drug stocks. And patients cut their treatment short when they felt better, or even shared pills with other family members.

There are two ways to get drug resistant TB. Most cases develop from taking medication inappropriately. But it can also be transmitted like simple TB, a cough or a sneeze.

In the 1980s, HIV and Aids brought an even bigger resurgence of TB cases. TB remains the biggest killer of HIV patients today.

—AP