This Is the Infectious Disease That You Should Be Worried About Lindsay Abrams - Salon
go to original December 9, 2014

In his 30 years studying tuberculosis, Dr. Mario Raviglione has tried - and failed - to figure out why everyone else keeps forgetting it exists. We'd forgotten about it, for example, in the 1980s - when Raviglione began his training in infectious diseases in New York City - even though, as he recalls, he was seeing cases every day among the city's homeless and HIV-positive populations.

That all changed in 1991, when multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) reached epidemic levels in New York. The city's incidence of TB had more than doubled in the past decade, representing a full 15 percent of all U.S. cases. Nearly a fifth of patients were failing to respond to first-line treatments. Suddenly, the infectious disease was front-page news, and the city scrambled to respond, at considerable cost; it took several years and more than $1 billion for things to finally be brought back under control.

Today, the U.S. only sees about 9,500 cases of TB each year, according to CDC data for 2013, and only 1.4 percent are drug resistant. Yet according to Raviglione, who currently directs the World Health Organization's global TB program, the powers that be have forgotten, repeatedly, that the disease continues to pose a threat.

"They believe that TB is an extinct disease," he told Salon. "I don’t know why."

Not only does TB remain alive and well, it turns out that its global burden is even higher than we thought. According to a WHO report released on Wednesday, 2013 saw nearly half a million more TB cases than was previously estimated: 9 million people became sick with the disease last year, and 1.5 million died. And drug resistance, WHO warned, occurred on average at a rate of 3.5 percent of new TB cases, putting it at crisis levels.

Read the rest at Salon

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