T.B
A major difficulty in treating patients with pulmonary TB is that the organism can become progressively resistant to standard therapy. This resistance was long thought to be acquired through mutations in the infecting strain when the treatment regimen was inadequate or the patient did not comply with it. More recently, studies of the genetic make-up of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) strains have shown that resistance can also result from re-infection with a new strain that is already drug-resistant, sometimes against multiple drugs. The authors of the new study, Qian Gao, PhD, and coworkers in Shanghai, China and elsewhere, used molecular genetics and drug susceptibility testing to investigate patients with TB who were treated in Shanghai hospitals during 1999-2004. They focused on 38 patients from whom samples were available before and during treatment. The researchers found that the strains of TB in the samples taken before treatment were genetically different f...