Indian TB cases 'can't be cured'

[keeperofthekeys]

Tuberculosis which appears to be totally resistant to antibiotic treatment has been reported for the first time by Indian doctors.

Comments

[dishapeaches]

That does it - I'm never leaving the house or having sex again. lol

[cheez_ball]

We all knew this was coming. I'm not sure quarantine will be effective because of the number of assymptomatic carriers and the wonky incubation time. Many people also spontaneously recover just to harbor granulomas that could resurface as active disease at any time.

IMO we rely too much on antibiotics and need to find other therapies.

[cupcakery]

Or we're going to go with bacteriophages.

[fenris_lorsrai]

I'm reading a really cheesy thriller right now that has a nasty virus that turns our normal helpful bacteria turn against us. so it has really weird stuff like your skin bacteria turning into the flesh eating sort and stuff. It's a fairly amusing popcorn read.

also someone gets eaten by biolumiscent squid, so that gives it extra popcorn points for me!

[crossfire]

There is not enough D: in the world for this.

sad story bro: One of my (many) friends who died from AIDS was taken by a secondary TB infection. It was...horrible.

[cupcakery]

Personally, I'm waiting for the bacteriological tests to come back because right now, all they're going on is clinical assessment and sometimes clinical assessment can be wrong. XDR-TB itself is treated with rounds of chemotherapy, so I wonder if that's going to be their next step for this supposedly TDR-TB for treatment. Right now, it's merely a form of XXDR-TB until they've gone through all of the possible treatments. Samples were sent to the national TB institute in India this morning to determine how extensively drug-resistant it is.

[lvsinsanity]

I admit I'm not really well versed in what's going on here, but can I ask exactly what your comment means? I'm really curious. Does the clinic not to bacterial tests as well to check these things? If so, why release this as news without all the tests having been completed?

I'm probably missing something huge right now because I'm not up on bacterial type diseases

[keeperofthekeys]

Not the OP, but they're probably referring to more extensive tests that would be done in a laboratory, like plating cultures on antibiotic-infused agar, to get an idea of the level of resistance to particular antibiotics the bug has. Right now it's been labeled as incurable because the proper clinical course of antibiotics failed to kill the bacteria in multiple cases. The article says the CDC has confirmed it though, so my impression was they had done the proper testing. I admit I haven't gone looking for the paper on the strain, though, so it might not be fully studied and published on yet.

[lvsinsanity]

Ahh, thank you for explaining that. I was a bit confused