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Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/dr...a-is-a-bigger-problem-than-previously-thought
Drug Resistant Tuberculosis in North Korea Is a Bigger Problem Than Previously Thought
By Jason Koebler
For years, the tuberculosis treatment strategy in North Korea was to give patients a short stint of antibiotics, let them get better, and then send them back into the world. This strategy worked for a while, but eventually North Korean doctors noticed the same patients kept coming back in--a sign of that antibiotic resistance had developed in the bacteria that causes the disease.
But with the country's abysmal health system and disease surveillance, doctors had no way of diagnosing or proving that multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR TB, had made its way into the population. Now they do. A study published this week in PLOS Medicine found that, of those treated for tuberculosis by Eugene Bell, an American / South Korean NGO that specializes in patients who relapse, 87 percent tested positive for MDR...
Drug Resistant Tuberculosis in North Korea Is a Bigger Problem Than Previously Thought
By Jason Koebler
For years, the tuberculosis treatment strategy in North Korea was to give patients a short stint of antibiotics, let them get better, and then send them back into the world. This strategy worked for a while, but eventually North Korean doctors noticed the same patients kept coming back in--a sign of that antibiotic resistance had developed in the bacteria that causes the disease.
But with the country's abysmal health system and disease surveillance, doctors had no way of diagnosing or proving that multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR TB, had made its way into the population. Now they do. A study published this week in PLOS Medicine found that, of those treated for tuberculosis by Eugene Bell, an American / South Korean NGO that specializes in patients who relapse, 87 percent tested positive for MDR...