If this can't be contained, one would have to question if FIFA would allow SA to host the World Cup. (Check out those HIV rates, what is that, 1 in 7?).
Combine that with their insane crime rate, and you have one truly wonderful country.
Expert: Killer TB strain, found in 28 South African hospitals, must have crossed borders
The Associated Press
Published: September 7, 2006
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa A killer strain of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis has been found in at least 28 hospitals across South Africa and almost certainly has spilled across borders, a specialist said Thursday.
The virtually untreatable super bug could jeopardize efforts to deal with the AIDS epidemic, according to experts from the U.N., the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 14 southern and central African nations convened to discuss how to combat the threat.
Experts note that TB diagnostics haven't changed in 100 years and TB medication in 50 years, calling for better and faster methods. They blamed the antiquated methods on the fact that TB is largely a disease of the poor — often spread by overcrowding when an infected person sneezes or coughs and the airborne bacteria infect someone else.
Last year the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, a nonprofit organization, began tests on a new treatment that would half the time of treatment to two or three months, lowering the risks of developing resistant strains and expanding the number of patients receiving treatment.
Currently, about 9 million new active cases of TB develop each year and about 2 million people die. Some 200 million more people will fall ill with TB by 2020 and 35 million will die, according to the alliance's projections.
In South Africa, no one knows how many people are infected with the particularly virulent strain announced last week, Professor Willem Sturm told the conference, highlighting the dilemma facing already overburdened health workers.
Victims in South Africa were "all over the place ... you can almost be sure there will be infection in Mozambique and even farther (abroad) because people travel, and quite some distance," Sturm told The Associated Press.
The new extremely drug-resistant TB strain was discovered by rural doctor Tony Moll in eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, where it killed 52 of 53 HIV-positive patients within 16 days during a study carried out from January 2005 to March 2006.
Sturm, a microbiologist at KwaZulu-Natal University's Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, said reports he had gathered from hospitals around the country this past week showed at least 28 hospitals had at least one patient with the new strain, but indicated others could be dying from it without ever being tested.
The super bug is particularly dangerous for countries with high HIV rates that fuel a TB epidemic which in turn endangers uninfected people. Moll became suspicious he had a super bug on his hands when patients responded well to antiretroviral treatment, then suddenly died.
"What's the point in investing hugely in ARV programs if patients die a few weeks later from extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis?" Dr. Paul Nunn, head of the U.N. World Health Organization's TB resistance program, said on the sidelines of the conference.
South Africa's government estimates more than 5.5 million of the country's 44 million people are HIV-positive — second only to India — and more than 900 people die each day. At any given time, some 330,000 South Africans have TB and 6,000 have a multiple drug-resistant variant. Half the population is believed to have latent TB.
Drug-resistance grows when people do not complete a grueling six-month regimen of medication that cures the disease. That's difficult in a country where most people are poor, where taking the medication on an empty stomach makes one ill, where one might have to walk half a day to the nearest health center, which might be out of medication, and where there is high illiteracy.
Multiple drug-resistant TB does not respond to a "first line" of drugs that in South Africa cost about R400 to cure a patient, compared to R24,000 to cure multiple drug-resistant TB. Extremely drug-resistant strains do not respond to a "second line" of drugs.
South Africa's Health Department said this week it was exploring the feasibility of importing two even more expensive drugs that might help. But Moll noted the new strain was so virulent that patients died even before doctors received the results of their tests.
