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 Tuberculosis (TB) causes nearly 10 million new cases and kills nearly 2 million people annually, making it one of the most serious infections worldwide.
In some regions, multidrug and even extensively drug resistant (MDR and XDR) strains are alarmingly prevalent, the latter often resistant to second-line drugs, including one fluoroquinolone. Silke Feuerriegel of the National Reference Center for Mycobacteria, Borstel, Germany, et al. analyzed strains from MDR-TB patients in Uzbekistan who were treated with second-line drugs in an effort to develop information that could be used to detect strains resistant to such drugs. They discovered a variety of mutations which, they write, "clearly demonstrate the potential of sequence analyses of short regions of a relatively few target genes for the rapid detection of resistance to second-line drugs among strains isolated from patients undergoing treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. The effective treatment of TB can not only be lifesaving for the individual, but is also essential to avoid spreading resistant strains, e.g., by transmission in a hospital," says Feuerriegel.
(S. Feuerriegel, H. S. Cox, N. Zarkua, H. A. Karimovich, K. Braker, S. Rüsch-Gerdes, and S. Niemann. 2009. Sequence analyses of just four genes to detect extensively drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in multidrug-resistant tuberculosis patients undergoing treatment. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 53:3353-3356.)
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