XDR-TB is an extremely drug-resistant strain of TB. It has been identified in 49 countries as of June 2008.

Legendary photographer and 2007 TED prize winner James Nachtwey spent a year shooting the worldwide health crisis. He’s put together the following video and from 3 October is exhibiting his photographs in major cities throughout the world – Times Square, Union Square and Columbus Circle in New York City, the National Theatre and Barbican Centre in London, film festivals in Los Angeles etc - to create awareness of the killer mutation of tuberculosis.

Many people think of TB as a disease of the past, but in 2007 alone, TB killed 1.7 million people. That’s 4,660 deaths a day, or one death from TB every 20 seconds...

XDR-TB patients have an 85% mortality rate. In some sampled populations, XDR-TB has had fatality rates approaching 100%.

Because many countries lack laboratory capacity to test for resistance, XDR-TB is widely under-reported.

TB is the leading cause of death among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in developing countries. Without TB treatment, 90 percent of PLWHA die within months of developing TB. With TB treatment, the lives of PLWHA can be extended 2-5 years, even without access to HIV antiretroviral therapy.

“XDR-TB sounds a clamorous warning: without the political will to control TB, we will not only fail to defeat HIV but may enable the rise of an incurable, airborne disease.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Current methods of drug-resistance testing typically take 6 to 16 weeks to get results. However, a new form of DNA test just becoming available has reduced the testing time to as little as two days. Under the older form of testing, half of patients with drug-resistant TB die before the disease can be accurately diagnosed and an appropriate drug regimen prescribed. It is imperative that the new test be widely distributed globally, in order to reduce wait time for results and implement effective treatment in a timely fashion.

But XDR-TB doesn’t have to mean a death sentence. With early, early diagnosis and aggressive treatment with the right combination of drugs, countries with good TB control programmes have demonstrated that a cure rate of 50% is possible.

Reversing the TB epidemic is a political issue as much as it is a health issue. The World Health Organization estimates that it will cost approximately $6.7 billion annually to reverse the TB epidemic. Currently, only slightly more than half of that is projected to be available at current funding levels. This gap is costing millions of lives.

Learn more about XDR-TB
xdrtb.org
WHO latest factsheet

XDR-TB in SA
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) could become a more serious public health risk than HIV and Aids because of government inaction. [IOL]

Want to do something? Take action by using the ACTION project and XDRTB.org’s toolkit