TUESDAY FEB 26, 2008 (Foodconsumer.org) -- The World Health Organization released a report today saying that multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has been recorded at the highest rates ever worldwide.

According to the report, nearly half a million new cases of tuberculosis each year would be MDR-TB, about 5% of nine million new TB cases of all types.

The finding is based on data from the largest survey to date on the scale of drug resistance in tuberculosis collected between 2002 and 2006 on 90,000 TB patients in 81 countries.

Extensively drug resistant tuberculosis or XDR-TB, a virtually untreatable disease, also has been reported in 45 countries.

HIV is a risk factor that increased the probability for the patient to acquire MDR-TB, the report says.   The report based on surveys in Latvia and Ukraine shows that those who carried HIV were twice as likely to have MDR-TB as those who did not have the virus.

The highest rate of MDR-TB among all cases of tuberculosis was found in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan where early a quarter of all new cases of TB or 22.3% were recorded as multidrug resistant.

High rates of MDR-TB among new cases of TB were also found in Moldova Ukraine (16%), Tomsk Oblast in the Russian Federation Tashkent in Uzkekistan (14.8%). These rates exceeded those published in the Who’s 2004 report. (19.4%), Doneysk in (15%) and

For more information, Anti-tuberculosis drug resistance in the world The report [pdf 2.48Mb]