Drug resistance among different genotypes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolated from patients from Tiruvallur, South India

✍ Scribed by Sivakumar Shanmugam; N. Selvakumar; Sujatha Narayanan

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 135 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1567-1348
• DOI: 10.1016/j.meegid.2011.03.011

✦ Synopsis

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of mortality worldwide. Globally India continues to have the highest tuberculosis incidence, accounting for one fifth of the global incidence and 2/ 3rd of the cases in south East Asia. Nearly 40% of the Indian population is infected with the TB bacillus. Each year, 1.9 million new cases of TB occur in the country, of which about 0.8 million are infectious new smear positive pulmonary TB cases (RNTCP, 2009). The TB burden is also compounded by drug resistance, multi-drug resistance (MDR, resistance to at least rifampicin and isoniazid) and HIV infection. Several small surveys conducted across the country have shown the MDR-TB prevalence rates in India to be around 3% among new cases, and 12% among retreatment cases. A large scale population based survey in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra had also indicated similar resistance [new-3% and retreatment 12-17%] (RNTCP, 2009).

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) spoligotype lineages found in different parts of the world are Beijing, Haarlem, and African clusters which have been associated with a number of major outbreaks (Brudey et al., 2006;Gagneux and Small, 2007). These lineages have been described as predominant pathotypes in the world (Kato-Maeda et al., 2001;Kubin et al., 1999).