M/XDR-Tuberculosis: Therapy as Prevention

As the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) has been globally declining over the past decades the World Health Organization (WHO) is now proposing the elimination of TB in Europe. However, in the absence of an effective vaccine for the prevention of TB, elimination of TB will not be possible in the near future due to the emergence of drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Forty-four percent of all patients identified with multidrug-resistant or extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB, XDR-TB) worldwide live in the European Region of the WHO. Management and prognosis of patients with M/XDR-TB is dramatically different from patients with pan drug-susceptible TB in several ways.