Prevalence of Multidrug and Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in Beijing, China: a Hospital-Based Retrospective Study

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease of worldwide public-health concern. The development of resistance to an increasing number of second-line drugs and those used to treat multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB is rapidly becoming an emergency that could hinder the prevention and treatment of TB globally. This study describes the resistance profile of MDR and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB with a hospital-based survey in Beijing, China, conducted in the period 2007 to 2009. Drug-susceptibility tests performed on 967 Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains isolated from 967 patients showed that the rate of resistance to at least one first-line and at least one second-line drug was 70.1% and 60.7%, respectively. The overall MDR rate was 19.4%, and 14.9% of the MDR cases were XDR. In conclusion, MDR and XDR TB represent a significant number of total TB cases, therefore effective measures to manage these resistant strains are desperately needed. Development of a national TB policy in China might be a key method for solving the present problems of TB management.