An article in January’s International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IJTLD) describes a strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that thrives in the presence of rifampicin identified in a patient in China. Dr Ying Zhang, senior author of the study, calls rifampicin-dependent TB an “unrecognised and potentially serious treatment issue”.

An article in January’s International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IJTLD) describes a strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that thrives in the presence of rifampicin. The potentially dangerous strain was identified in a patient in China.
“Rifampicin-dependent tuberculosis is an unrecognised and potentially serious treatment issue”, said senior author Dr Ying Zhang in an interview at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he is a professor.
“Rifampicin resistance is ominous. Our study highlights the potential dangers of continued treatment of MDR-TB with rifamycins that occur frequently due to delayed or absent drug susceptibility testing in the field. Further studies are urgently needed to determine how common such rifampin-dependent multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB is in field conditions, and if it contributes to the worsening of the disease in MDR patients and treatment failures”.
To read “An interesting case of rifampicin-dependent/-enhanced multidrug-resistant tuberculosis” (Zhong, M.; Zhang, X.; Wang, Y.; Zhang, C.; Chen, G.; Hu, P.; Li, M.; Zhu, B.; Zhang, W.; Zhang, Y. Int J Tuberc Lung Dis 2010; 14 (1): 40-44), click here.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iuatld/ijtld/2010/00000014/00000001/art00007
To read the press release from Johns Hopkins, click here
http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2009/zhang_antibiotic_tb.html