African migrants bring untreatable form of tuberculosis to Europe

African migrants bring untreatable form of tuberculosis to Europe
By VOICE OF EUROPE 13 January 2018

Experts of the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, discovered a “multidrug-resistant” form of tuberculosis in eight refugees who came from the Horn of Africa.

In a new official report the Swiss laboratory mentions several cases from 2016. The head of diagnostics Peter Keller says:

“These bacteria exhibited a new combination of resistance mutations against four different antibiotics that had never before been seen.”

The report says a laboratory in Germany also registered a case “with the same pathogen”. After checking data of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), a total of 21 cases were identified. All cases were related to patients had also come from either the Horn of Africa or Sudan.

The pathogen was prevented from spreading further, after the authorities took several preventive measures. Head of diagnostics Keller says about it:

“The extraordinary case led to the development of a European alerting organization for dangerous tuberculosis pathogens”.

According to the report data indicates that the infection spread among migrants in a refugee camp near Bani Walid in Libya. It is not clear how many patients with the pathogen were identified in 2017.