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Yes. Tuberculosis very well exists.

Though TB is not prevalent in developed countries like USA, it remains a world-wide public health problem, 85% of all TB cases are in the region of South East Asia, Africa and Western Pacific.

During the year 2008, there were approximately 9 million incident cases (new cases) globally with 11million prevalent (old + new) cases in the same year..with 1.8 million deaths!!

HIV patients are most prone to TB. Out of the 11million cases mentioned above, 1.4 million were of HIV-associated TB.

The main reason for TB to be so prevalent is poor socio-economic status, therefore malnutrition, low hygiene, overcrowding-leading to spread of diseases.The treatment regime is under DOTS (direct observed treatment short course) programme which is a 6 to 8months long course, which patients, unless counselled, don't tend to follow, in spite of being given free medicines..Other reasons are the side-effects of drugs.

The major problem we face now is the emergence of multi drug resistance (MDR) TB (0.15 million deaths due to MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB(50,000 deaths), wherein the tubercle bacilli DO NOT respond to the drugs!!

INDIA has the highest TB burden in the world, accounting for 20% of the global cases. Here, TB kills 0.32 million cases every year.

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14y ago

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