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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Supercharged Tuberculosis, Made in India

A patient with extensively drug-resistant TB flew from Mumbai to Chicago, and the deadly disease could become an infamous export due to problems in India's public health system

Now, difficult-to-kill TB is no longer just India's nightmare. In June U.S. health authorities confirmed that an Indian patient carried this extreme form of the infection, called XDR-TB, across the ocean to Chicago. The patient drove from there to visit relatives as far away as Tennessee and Missouri. Health officials in several states are tracking down everyone with whom the patient—who is now quarantined and being treated at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland—had prolonged contact. The disease can be cured in only 30 percent of patients and sometimes requires surgery to remove infected parts of lungs. Although TB’s slow rate of infection makes explosive epidemics unlikely, the Chicago episode shows how easy it might be for the illness to become a worldwide export.

Yet until recently Indian public health officials remained reluctant to admit there's a problem, says Nerges Mistry, director of the Mumbai-based Foundation for Medical Research. “They were always trying to deny it [existed],” she says. (Neither the head of India's Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) nor Mumbai's main tuberculosis control official—both of whom are new to their posts—responded to interview requests from Scientific American.)

If there are indeed many people with resistant germs, it heightens the chances of those pathogens leaving the country for the rest of the world. Nearly a million Indians traveled to the U.S. in 2014, compared with less than three million from all of central Asia. More and more middle-class Indians are being diagnosed with TB, and although the patient who carried XDR-TB to the U.S. was immediately placed in isolation, India has no provisions for quarantines or travel restrictions.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supercharged-tuberculosis-made-in-india1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScientificAmerican-News+%28Content%3A+News%29 [scientificamerican.com]

http://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/drtb/xdrtb.htm [cdc.gov]
http://www.medicinenet.com/extensively_drug-resistant_tuberculosis_xdr_tb/article.htm [medicinenet.com]
http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/xdr/faqs/en/ [who.int]

Yes, the headline is sensationalist - but there really IS a problem here, as evidenced by the CDC, WHO, and other organizations. Perhaps the problem wasn't created by India's restructured medical school system, but it has almost certainly been increased by it.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/agra/SN-Medical-College-trauma-centre-has-no-staff-patients/articleshow/45087234.cms [indiatimes.com]

"Not a single serious patient has ever been treated at the centre. Whenever a minister or a dignitary plans to pay a visit to the centre, a few are admitted in the intensive care unit (ICU) to 'show' them," said a doctor,

Original Submission