There's a crisis brewing in North Korea that has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or six-party talks. Tuberculosis has long been recognized as one of the biggest public health problems in North Korea, but there is a disturbing new development: much of the TB in North Korea is resistant to regular antibiotics.
Throughout the course of history, TB has killed more people than all other pandemics combined. The development of modern antibiotic therapy turned this feared plague into a treatable infectious disease. A six-month course of standard first-line TB drugs cures almost all patients with regular TB. But like any other infectious disease, TB can become resistant to antibiotics if not treated correctly. The most serious strains of drug-resistant TB, called "multidrug-resistant," or MDR-TB, don’t respond to treatment with first-line TB drugs. Treatment of MDR-TB relies on older and weaker drugs that are hundreds of times more expensive than regular TB drugs. Even in the U.S., a diagnosis of MDR-TB is very serious. A single patient may require medications costing thousands of dollars, months of hospitalization, and even surgery to cut out diseased lung.
For North Korean patients, MDR-TB is basically a death sentence.
Until now, there has never been any clear scientific evidence that drug-resistant TB is a serious problem in North Korea, mainly because North Korea does not yet have a laboratory with the capacity to do this sort of research. Nevertheless, evidence about drug-resistant TB is not difficult to find. I regularly travel to North Korea as part of my work with the Eugene Bell Foundation, a private non-profit organization that supports patients in the TB sanatoria that dot the North Korean countryside. The doctors who work in these sanatoria have been quite open about the fact that they have patients who are not being cured with regular TB drugs. They’ve suspected that these patients had drug-resistant TB, but they couldn't know for sure without access to laboratory testing.
My research, published today in PLOS Medicine, analyzed sputum samples from more than 200 of these patients and found that the North Korean doctors were indeed correct—87 percent were proven to have MDR-TB.
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Note: The author, Dr. KJ Seung, is the senior health and policy advisor for tuberculosis at Partners In Health.