First case of highly drug-resistant TB found in U.S.

It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away. Then came the fevers, which 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 4 a.m., 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.”

TorrentBomb reports that 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 – the U.S. first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The AP 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 U.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. “He is really the future,” Ashkin said. “This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I’m not sure how we treat them.”

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

TorrentBomb writes that just as the drugs were a manmade solution to dangerous illness, the problem with them is also manmade. It is fueled worldwide by everything from counterfeit drugmakers to the unintended consequences of giving drugs to the poor without properly monitoring their treatment. Here is what the 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 percent of new patients. HIV drug resistance rates have shot up to as high as 30 percent worldwide.

— 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 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who was himself infected with tuberculosis while caring for drug-resistant patients at a New York clinic in the early 1990s. “We are all connected by the air we breathe, and that is why this must be everyone’s problem.”

This April, the World Health Organization (WHO) sounded alarms by holding its first drug-resistant TB conference in Beijing. The message was clear — the disease has already spread to all continents and is increasing rapidly. Even worse, WHO estimates only 1 percent of resistant patients received appropriate treatment last year. “We have seen a huge upburst in resistance,” said CDC epidemiologist Dr. Laurie Hicks.