WHO exposes multi-drug resistance TB in Western in Western’

THE World Health Organisation is warning of the potential for an untreatable form of tuberculosis to develop on Australia’s doorstep.
It says infections of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) in Papua New Guinea’s remote southwest had reached crisis levels.
The country’s health minister said tuberculosis was now a greater health emergency than HIV/AIDS.
Dr Catharina Van Weezenbeek, from the World Health Organisation, said it was now clear the problem “is in a state of emergency”.
“If you just look at the numbers of MDR TB cases, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a crisis,” she said.
“Children as young as 14 are infected with MDR TB in a family with already five patients dying.”
A research team from WHO found the rural health centres were rundown with very limited or no medical supplies.
There is no TB coordinator in the region so no one is monitoring patients to ensure they stick to the lengthy treatment of drugs required to beat the disease, meaning many do not.
WHO’s Dr Donald Enarson said that had led to the emergence of the MDR TB.
“Multi-drug resistance has passed from being created from bad treatment to now being established in a community by itself and spreading among community members,” he said.
Local medical records show 94 people had contracted MDR TB in Western since 2005.
But the records are incomplete and WHO suspects those cases are just the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
The organisation’s MDR TB expert, Dr Ernesto Jaramillo, said the situation had the potential to get much worse.
“When treatment is delivered under the current conditions which many patients are having, then it is a matter of months or years before we have forms of tuberculosis that cannot be cured.”