The rest of the world has had drug resistant TB for years. I am sure Papua New Guinea has also had it for years, but we were never able to really prove it . . . until now. Since I have been here, I have suspected that people had resistant TB if they didn’t improve on their TB medicines, and so I would give them an injectable medicine for 2 months and hoped that would be enough. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. But without any other option, we did the best we could. That all changed about 5 months ago when we got a new machine called the Gene Xpert machine. This is a machine that can determine if someone’s TB is resistant to the standard drugs that we use to treat TB. We have been testing patients we thought might have resistant TB, but hadn’t gotten any positives so far (which was great for our patients). That changed last week. I saw a kid who had finished his TB treatment in December, but was having more weight loss and coughing. Just looking at him I was worried he had TB, and his Chest Xray confirmed TB, but then the question was does he have resistant TB. So we sent him to get the Gene Xpert test and the next day, he comes back to see me with the words MDR-TB written in his book. MultiDrugResistant TB is what MDR-TB stands for. It is bad. It means…
Source: It is here . . . from Erin Meier – Asia Pacific