June 7, 2007

What You Need to Know About TB

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve heard about the case involving an attorney with a highly drug-resistant form of tuberculosis who may have exposed others to the disease during several international flights.

But what is “drug-resistant” TB and how does it differ from the garden variety form of the condition?

Mari Jones, a registered respiratory therapist from the American Association for Respiratory Care, explains typical TB is a lung disease that’s spread through the air as people cough or sneeze. The condition is both treatable and curable with standard medications.

Drug resistant forms are spread in the same way, but they are much more worrisome because the bacteria that cause them have developed a resistance to at least some of the common TB drugs. The attorney in the news today has an especially dangerous form, known as extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR TB. XDR TB is resistant to both standard first-line and second-line drugs and thus requires experimental treatment with other drugs not generally used in TB cases.

The man is now receiving this type of treatment at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, CO, which has long been a leader in the care and treatment of tuberculosis.

What’s causing the TB bacteria to develop a resistance to standard drugs? Jones traces the problem back to the AIDS epidemic. “The onset of HIV and AIDS has increased the number of people contracting TB due to the fact that people with depressed immune systems are more susceptible to the disease, especially if they are also in contact with people likely to have TB – such as those in prisons, drug users, etc.”

As the number of TB cases has risen, so has the likelihood people won’t follow through with the extensive treatment necessary to cure the condition, and that opens the door to drug resistance.

“Resistant TB has come about because people with TB have not finished the prescribed regimen of three to four medications that must be taken for 18 months,” says Jones. When people stop taking their medications too soon, the bacteria are not completely eradicated, and those that remain can build up a resistance to the drugs used to kill them.

In other words, says the respiratory therapist, “The bacteria has mutated so that the present drugs no longer work.”

So, what do you need to know to protect yourself from TB, and especially, its drug-resistant forms? Jones says the first step is to learn more about the disease in general, and you can do that right here on www.yourlunghealth.org by visiting our resources on tuberculosis.

To learn more about drug-resistant TB, visit the CDC’s extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis page.