Drug-resistant TB: A growing problem

Despite advances in the field of medicine, tuberculosis remains a major killer worldwide. One reason is because of the increasing number of drug-resistant strains of the bacterium that causes TB.

“About 450,000 people developed multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) in 2012. More than half of these cases were in India, China and the Russian Federation. It is estimated that about 9.6 percent of MDR-TB cases had extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB),” the World Health Organization (WHO) said, adding that 170,000 have died of the disease.