Inadequate treatment allows the TB bacteria to mutate into a stronger form, fueling drug resistance.
Drug resistance may slow the decline but economic growth should mean it does not reverse.
WSJ: Matt Ridley on Infectious Diseases and Standards of Living | Mind & Matter
They added that their results also showed that drug resistance could spread across continents without much difficult.
Drug resistance and disease progression have been observed all for anticancer drugs that target specific genetic alterations.
The latest study was carried out for the Global Project on Anti-Tuberculosis Drug Resistance Surveillance, which was set up in 1994.
BBC: Patients must complete a full course of drugs to cure TB
The WHO has been compiling reports of drug resistance since the mid-1990s, but it relied on countries to do the surveillance.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
"The value of having access to comprehensive drug resistance testing technologies helped to clarify this patient's best treatment options, " says Dr. David D.
There hasn't been a nationwide survey of drug resistance, but India and the WHO say 2% to 3% of India's TB patients are drug resistant.
In January, researchers at the hospital reported the first cases of patients who had developed such severe drug resistance that virtually no traditional treatments worked.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
Professor David Back, an expert in HIV pharmacology at the University of Liverpool said development of drug resistance was the main problem with current therapy.
India's own strategic plan for TB calls for improving medical care in the private sector, in addition to scaling up testing and treatment of drug resistance nationwide.
The focus now is on trying to monitor and contain artemisinin drug resistance into a few hotspots, prolonging the drug's effective lifespan globally until alternative treatments are available.
With drug resistance accelerating, that time is now for TB.
FORBES: To Stop Tuberculosis In Its Tracks, Urgent Global Action Is Needed
Mumbai TB supervisors agree, saying some patients wait many months to get the right treatment because there aren't enough accredited labs to confirm diagnoses of more extreme drug resistance.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
"We have used microcantilever arrays to investigate drug resistance in superbugs such as MRSA, and are excited by the opportunity to extend this approach to detecting HIV markers, " she said.
Rik Scheper and his colleagues at the Free University of Amsterdam inadvertently stumbled across the major vault protein when they were looking for proteins important in drug resistance in tumour cells.
Growing drug resistance and changing climates means that older drugs like chloroquine have become less effective and so new generations of drugs like Lariam have been recommended as frontline preventative treatment.
The change followed a Journal investigation in 2012 revealing that India, for years, had ignored evidence of increasing drug resistance and today likely has far higher rates of resistant TB than officially reported.
Shortening treatment time from the current minimum of six to two months would keep an additional one million people on TB treatment each year, reducing deaths and slowing the development of drug resistance.
FORBES: To Stop Tuberculosis In Its Tracks, Urgent Global Action Is Needed
This trend is likely contributing to drug resistance.
FORBES: To Stop Tuberculosis In Its Tracks, Urgent Global Action Is Needed
Dr. CASTRO: Then if it's positive, you add another couple of weeks for drug resistance testing, so you can see already a month interval easily going by before you have any result where you can hang your hat on.
Last year Dr. Kumar, head of the health ministry's Central TB Division, publicly criticized Hinduja Hospital and its researchers, saying their findings of "total drug resistance" published in a medical journal would hurt Indian tourism and should have been reported to him first.
In light of that, some physicians say they are troubled by the fact that the government hasn't yet accredited one private lab in Mumbai Hinduja Hospital, where Dr. Udwadia works that they consider the most experienced in the country at testing patients for drug resistance.
Indian officials emphasized the data hasn't yet been peer reviewed and should be considered preliminary, mostly because the study is continuing and was designed mainly to test the feasibility of using the GeneXpert machines and not to get a representative measure of drug resistance.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
Because patients in many countries aren't tested fully for drug resistance, and national surveys aren't always done, it is difficult to know precisely how widespread drug resistance is or whether the number of cases is on the rise globally, said Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB Department.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
Last year, Mumbai's government program diagnosed and treated about 30 new patients with multi-drug-resistance a month.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
Still, for Mumbai to stem its drug-resistance epidemic, "a massive infusion of resources" is needed, said Dr. Dewan.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
The WHO and India currently estimate India has about 100, 000 of the 650, 000 people in the world with multi-drug-resistance.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
But in the absence of a nationwide survey, the data offered a first look at what India's drug-resistance rates might be.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
It is curable in almost all who are treated, but the rate of recovery from multi-drug-resistance is far lower, although studies vary widely.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
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