Picking Up the Pace — Scale-Up of MDR Tuberculosis Treatment Programs

Multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis is a treatable, airborne infectious disease that killed an estimated 1.5 million people between 2000 and 2009 — an annual rate 10 times that of the H1N1 influenza virus.1,2 During this period, barely 0.5% of the estimated 5 million people who became ill with MDR tuberculosis received treatment with quality-assured second-line drugs. The rest continued to transmit resistant bacteria to others — in their homes, communities, workplaces, and other places where people congregate. The results: an increase, in a number of locales, in the proportion of tuberculosis cases that were MDR; a frightening increase in the . . .