TB patients dying without dignity as drug resistance soars

NEW tuberculosis (TB) infections have declined around the world — everywhere except in sub-Saharan Africa. And the explosion of drug-resistant TB strains in South Africa, and other countries in the area, has led to diagnoses of totally drug-resistant TB (TDR-TB).

This is according to a 70-page commission on drugresistant TB (DR-TB) published in the Lancet medical journal today to mark World TB Day.

“We do have this phenomenon of incurable TB —despite having some access to newer drugs. Patients are even failing treatment on the more potent regimens. And it’s going to continue,” lead author Professor Keertan Dheda told Health-e News.

Globally, only 5 percent of TB is drug-resistant. But in countries like South Africa, resistant strains are spreading. They are expensive, time-consuming and difficult to treat.

According to the humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders (MSF), in 2015, 20 000 people in the country were diagnosed with some form of DR-TB.

While most of these people had multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) — resistant to two of the most effective anti-TB drugs — or extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) — resistant to four of the most effective anti-TB drugs, a small fraction was totally drug resistant.

“This expansion of resistance has ushered in an era of programmatically incurable tuberculosis, in which insufficient effective drugs remain to construct a curative regimen,” noted the Lancet authors.

“It’s incurable in the sense that the drugs available on national TB programmes aren’t able to cure these patients,” explained Dheda, who heads up the Division of Pulmonology at the University of Cape Town.

Even though patients in South Africa have access to the new anti-TB drugs, there are patients for whom no drug regimen will work. “Already, we have seen patients who have failed on regimens containing bedaquiline, suggesting resistance to the drug,” he said.

According to Dheda and the Lancet report, there have already been several cases around the world of resistance to both bedaquiline and delamanid.

For patients diagnosed with incurable TB there are few options, said Dheda, as “the sheer extent” of South Africa’s TB problem means that TB hospitals — with proper infection control measures in place — are over-crowded.

“The problem is so big we have to send patients home. We give them advice on infection control – like keep the door and windows open. But often people’s living circumstances make these demands unrealistic. Sometimes there are five or six people sleeping in the same room. They need to look after their families,” he said.

But patients sent home risk transmitting these incurable strains to other people in the community. Research done by Dheda in two provinces suggests this is already happening in South Africa. — AP