TB rate down in U.S., but drug-resistant cases rise elsewhere The CDC says tuberculosis prevalence dropped 11.8% last year, as the World Health Organization reports about 440,000 multi-drug-resistant cases worldwide in 2008, a third of them fatal.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that TB prevalence in this country dropped 11.8% last year, the largest yearly decline since the government began monitoring the disease in 1953. But on the same day, the World Health Organization reported that an estimated 440,000 people worldwide had multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in 2008, and a third of them died.
Even with tuberculosis cases falling sharply in the United States to historic lows, strains of drug-resistant disease are gaining ground elsewhere in the world.
Nearly half of the cases were in China and India, which have been hit hardest by the outbreak. But in some areas of the world, especially three provinces in Russia, more than 1 in every 4 cases of tuberculosis result from the hard-to-treat strain.
Overall, there were 9.4 million new TB cases in 2008 and 1.8 million deaths, so the drug-resistant strains are a relatively small problem. But experts fear they will displace conventional strains of the TB mycobacterium, complicating treatment. Conventional TB treatment costs about $20 and takes six months. Drug-resistant strains can cost as much as $500 and take as long as two years to treat.
The CDC said there were 11,540 U.S. TB cases reported in 2009, 40% of them in people born in this country. The rate of disease was 11 times as high in foreign-born people as in native-born Americans. The rates in blacks and Latinos were eight times as high as the rate in whites, and the rate in Asians was 26 times as high.
A total of 108 U.S. cases of multi-drug-resistant TB were reported in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.
Experts suspect that the sharp decline in TB cases is related to improved screening for the disease among potential immigrants and the weak economy, which has slowed immigration and caused many immigrants to return to their homes soon after arrival.
The California Department of Public Health said the state had seen the largest decline in TB cases since 2000: an 8.6% drop to 2,472 cases.
thomas.maugh@ latimes.com
Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' is the most common cause of tuberculosis 
The World Health Organization released their annual report on the world prevalence of tuberculosis in 2008. The report said that there were 9.8 million cases of tuberculosis, with 1.8 million resulting in death. The report also said that there were 440,000 cases of multi drug resistant tuberculosis, with about one-third of them being fatal.   

The average cost to treat a case of tuberculosis was US$20 (€14.78, £13.32), over a six month period. The cost to treat a case of drug resistant tuberculosis was US$500 (€365.55, £333.00), and up-to two years of treatment.

Some of the hardest hit regions include nations of the former Soviet Union, and specifically Tajikistan which according to the report "had proportions of 16.5 percent MDR-TB ''sic'':Multi-Drug Resistant tuberculosis among new TB cases and 61.6 percent MDR-TB among previously treated TB patients in Dushanbe city and Rudaki district, or the highest proportion ever reported among previously treated TB patients in a subnational area,".

The prevalence of tuberculosis in the United States dropped 11.5% with only 11,540 new cases, with 108 of them being drug resistant.