Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Found in U.S.

This is nice to know.

Public health officials are concerned about the implications of the first case of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) found in the United States in 19-year-old Peruvian, Oswaldo Juarez, who is visiting here to study English. Somehow he contracted the extremely drug-resistant XXDR-TB without ever having had tuberculosis before. This form of drug-resistant TB is virtually impervious to all the drugs that are used to treat the disease.

Elsewhere, scientists have identified a strain of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis that is resistant to rifampin, the front-line antibiotic to treat TB. The rifampin-resistant strain was identified in a patient in China and is described in a study that will appear in the January 2010 issue of The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

Meanwhile, physicians and researchers around the world are expressing growing alarm over the disturbing escalation of a variety of antibiotic-resistant diseases they say are rapidly mutating. Some are worried because they fear these diseases will evolve into dominate strains for which we have no new antibiotics to treat the level of resistance that we are now witnessing.

Of course, if the situation worsens to the alarm level, expect public health officials to start placing patients in quarantine.