When tuberculosis kills lung tissue, it can produce gaping holes like in the lung on the right.
For a long time, tuberculosis
was a gruesome and incurable disease. Antibiotics changed that, but over the last century, as the drugs have been incorrectly used, the tuberculosis bacterium has been developing resistance to them. Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis
, which requires a cocktail of many drugs to treat it, has become common. Now Indian doctors have reported in a medical journal that a strain that is resistant to all known drugs for tuberculosis has appeared in Mumbai
. Twelve patients so far have been diagnosed with the strain
, and it's likely that they are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of those infected. At the Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna explains that this is the third time on record that totally drug-resistant TB (TDR-TB) has appeared
. The most recent cases ...
