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GENEVA-The cyclone that devastated Myanmar last month forced many tuberculosis sufferers to stop their treatment, triggering fears of drug-resistant strains spreading, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.Myanmar had 83,000 cases of the highly contagious disease in 2006 causing 6,000 deaths, according to the WHO's most recent figures for the diplomatically isolated country whose army rulers were initially reluctant to let in foreign aid workers after Cyclone Nargis hit on May 2.The storm killed up to 134,000 people, left 2.4 million destitute, and destroyed many of the health centers which handed out antibiotics.WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said experts from the United Nations agency would travel to cyclone-affected areas this week to track down tuberculosis patients who lost access to their drugs since the May 2 storm."They will go to the hospitals and health centers, look at the records, look how many people were on treatment, and then try to trace them in villages and camps," Chaib said, calling the hiatus resulting from the storm "a serious issue"."Tuberculosis is a life-threatening disease. Interrupting a course of six-month treatment can have an effect on creating resistance to tuberculosis drugs," she said.Any pause in a course of antibiotics can give the bacterium causing tuberculosis a chance to mutate and build up immunity to standard medicines. Drug-resistant strains can require patients to take an expensive and arduous course of pills and injections, and some types are virtually untreatable. Even before the cyclone, the weak health system and pervasiveness of fake drugs in Myanmar were seen as potential triggers for drug resistant tuberculosis.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
