"There's another TB statistic that's particularly worrisome. The new report estimates that there were roughly half a million cases of multi-drug-resistant TB la

"There's another TB statistic that's particularly worrisome. The new report estimates that there were roughly half a million cases of multi-drug-resistant TB last year, double the number from the year 2000. Conventional antibiotics can't cure MDR-TB. Treatment can take two years or more with drugs that cause severe side-effects; some patients are left completely deaf." I did a semester-long report on TB in college, and our findings were that multiple drug resistant TB and poly-drug resistant TB would be growing public health problems in poor countries in the coming decades. This was a conservative way of framing that problem. Realistically, TB is wildly infectious, and extremely dangerous to societies that can't afford treatment. The clinch is that TB is entirely treatable, but it is very money and resource intensive to do so, requiring reliable access to medication and quarantining from healthy people over a long period of time. In poor countries, compliance with single drug regimens isn't great a lot of the time due to nonexistent infrastructure for distribution and treatment monitoring-- requiring a cocktail of drugs to deal with drug resistant TB is no different. Additionally, TB-specific hospitals, where they exist, are largely places that people with TB go to die. Their relatives frequently get infected from visiting a TB-infested hospital den, of course. The rise of XDR-TB (poly drug resistant) means that a growing number of people get a death sentence from an otherwise treatable disease. The suggestions I made in my college report were to invest in healthcare infrastructure and secured involuntary quarantine facilities; the former to help those with MDR-TB and regular TB, and the latter for the rest, who probably can't be helped rationally under utilitarian economics of a poor country. Best to limit exposure to the healthy.