At her Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna reports on a disturbing, but not unexpected development: over the past three months, 12 cases of tuberculosis at a single Mumbai hospital have been found to be resistant to all the drugs used to treat the disease.
This is not the first time totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB) has been reported; in 2009, McKenna notes, the disease was identified in 15 patients in Iran. This was only three years after extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) was first identified. The drivers of such rapidly evolving drug resistance include inadequate…