Tuberculosis (TB) has long been one of the world’s great killers. Now, forms of drug-resistant TB--multidrug (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR)--are occurring at an ominous and accelerating rate. To help in the fight against drug-resistant TB, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has formulated an MDR and XDR TB research agenda.

Kazakhstan's health ministry said Wednesday that the number of people, infected by drug-resistant tuberculosis is on the rise in almost all of the country's regions.

In South Africa, the 2001 implementation of the World Health Organization’s anti-tuberculosis program may have inadvertently helped to create a new strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB).

Doctors has completed genome for extra drug-resistant tuberculosis in South Africa, the Associated Press said Thursday.

An arsenal of promising new medications, vaccines, and diagnostic tests are moving toward the global battlefield that pits medicine against drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), which is claiming a terrible toll, particularly in HIV-infected individuals, according to an article scheduled for the Sept. 24 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

An American man who traveled internationally with tuberculosis - despite instructions not to - has a new diagnosis and is not as sick as government doctors initially said he was. As VOA's Carol Pearson reports, the new diagnosis comes as a huge relief to the patient, his family and to everyone he came in contact with.

To many people, tuberculosis evokes images of 19th-century sanatoriums. It seems like an old-fashioned disease that was conquered long ago. Or else TB is seen as a "marginal" illness affecting only the down-and-out.

Public health officials are growing increasingly concerned about drug resistant forms of tuberculosis. Last year, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant TB killed 52 of 53 people infected. TB is highly contagious, and to keep drug-resistant types from spreading, some health experts are considering mandatory quarantines.

There is the unknown extent of the deadly new strain of tuberculosis in South Africa and the region. This problem is a cause for concern, an international health expert said Wednesday. Dr Fabio Scano, a TB expert from the World Health Organization in Geneva, has been sent to South Africa at the request of the government to assist with the outbreak of the extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis strain, or XDR-TB.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says the rise of a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis (TB) is threatening efforts to bring the global epidemic of ordinary TB under control.

Tuberculosis in Russia is one of the country's top health emergencies. The country has the highest TB mortality rate in Europe, 20 times higher than in the West. About half of all cases reported in the former Soviet Union are in Russia. Of particular concern in the region is the prevelance of a drug-resistant form of TB. VOA's Lisa McAdams in Moscow looks at Russian and Eurasian efforts to contain the disease, which doubled in the 1990s, but has leveled off since 2000.