Gatonye Gathura
25 August 2008
Nairobi — A tuberculosis strain initially thought to be untreatable because it was resistant to most drugs has now been conquered.
But the cost of conquering the extra-drug resistant (XDR) TB strain, which appeared about two years ago, has been high, exceeding several million shillings for each patient.
The strain was considered a death sentence after it killed 52 of 53 people in South Africa. The deaths occurred within 25 days.
The Lancet medical journal reported the good news, saying that XDR TB was successfully treated using a combination of at least five drugs.
This is welcome news for Kenya, which is ranked high among the 22 countries that account for about 80 per cent of the world's TB cases.
Last year, 116,723 cases of TB were detected in the country compared to 115,234 cases in 2006.
In the past six years, about 289 cases of multi-drug-resistant (MDR) TB, not to be confused with the more deadly XDR, have been detected.
The MDR strain does not respond to the standard treatments using first-line drugs like Rifampicin and Isoniazid. It costs up to Sh1.3 million to treat one case of the multi-drug-resistant TB compared to Sh6,000 for treatment of an ordinary case of the disease.
The XDR TB was a totally different ball game because it did not respond to any treatment. But there was a breakthrough when 600 patients in Russia were put on trials. According to the Lancet report, five per cent of these patients were found to have XDR TB. Each was given an individually tailored treatment programme according to the strain they had.
Fully cured
Almost half of the super-strain patients and 67 per cent of multi-drug resistant TB patients were cured.
Study leader Dr Salmaan Kashavjee, of the Harvard Medical School in the US is quoted as saying that aggressive management of the strain is possible. But this can only be done with well funded and structured TB programmes, researchers say.
The study confirms an earlier one published in the August 7 issue of the New England Journal. The research was carried out in Lima, Peru. The study also used a cocktail of drugs and achieved a 60 per cent cure rate.
Although Kenya has not been officially identified as an XDR TB area, medical experts have not ruled out the presence of the strain, citing the country's poor disease monitoring system and lack of technology.
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