The researchers, reporting in the Lancet medical journal, found 32 cases of TB in those who had received the vaccine compared with 39 in the placebo group.
And now added to that list are the lives of vulnerable TB patients and those who are exposed to their disease.
"The government welcomes all initiatives that support the fight against tuberculosis, " Anshu Prakash, joint secretary of health for India, who oversees TB, told The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
The case of Ms. Skipper, the Tennessean who contracted TB while volunteering in a small hospital in South Africa, shows how difficult it is to keep the disease outside U.S. borders.
For confirmed XDR-TB, in which the bacterium is resistant to the most potent first- and second-line TB medicines, the WHO recommends that a proper combination of any medicine left among those available, dictated by knowledge of susceptibility, should be used.
WSJ: The WHO Supports India's Fight Against MDR-TB �� Letters to the Editor
And he said that the dispersal policy could bring TB to the notice of the GPs in the leafy suburbs who may never have had a TB case before.
In hopes of slowing the epidemic, Dr. Arata Kochi, director of WHO's global TB program, has been promoting DOTS therapy (directly observed treatment, short-course), whereby health-care workers watch patients take their medicine completely and correctly.
Diabetics who are infected with TB become ill with the disease at three times the ratio of the general population because their immune systems are compromised, said Dr. Seaworth, who is also a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Tyler.
Because patients in many countries aren't tested fully for drug resistance, and national surveys aren't always done, it is difficult to know precisely how widespread drug resistance is or whether the number of cases is on the rise globally, said Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB Department.
WSJ: Tuberculosis Strain in Mumbai Doesn't Respond to Main Treatment
To raise international awareness of the disease's causes, development and cures, the WHO declared March 24 World TB Day.
This information may influence the treatment of people living with HIV who are co-infected with TB.
For doctors who don't specialize in TB, treatment of resistant strains gets tricky.
One third of deaths of those who are HIV-positive are TB related.
Nepal reported more than 35, 000 TB cases in 2011, and 2.9% of new and 12% of previously-treated TB cases are multidrug-resistant, according to WHO data.
The Journal also showed that the WHO's own policies inadvertently helped drug-resistant TB to flourish.
India has made enormous progress in TB control and to imply otherwise wouldn't accurately reflect the WHO's opinion.
WSJ: The WHO Supports India's Fight Against MDR-TB �� Letters to the Editor
There hasn't been a nationwide survey of drug resistance, but India and the WHO say 2% to 3% of India's TB patients are drug resistant.
From their analysis, the WHO team estimated there were 424, 000 cases of multidrug-resistant TB world-wide in 2004.
BBC: Patients must complete a full course of drugs to cure TB
The new test was trialled on 50 healthy volunteers who attended a contact-tracing clinic in London after having been exposed to TB in varying degrees.
The WHO warns that crisis looms large in Asia, home to the majority of the world's TB cases, and predicts that the incidence of TB attributable to HIV in Asia will rise from 2% in 1900 to 14% by 2000.
India is home to the largest number of TB patients 2.2 million of the world's 8.7 million, according to the WHO's latest estimates.
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