GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world.
Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for a deadly disease, which takes up to two years to treat and is cured in Western Europe only one third of the time.
Categories: Health, Preventive Medicine