HIV not a super-spreader of drug-resistant tuberculosis
The findings, from a collaboration between Norwegian, British and Argentinian scientists, also show that TB drug resistance is not more likely to evolve in HIV-positive patients compared to HIV-negative patients. "It is already known that a parallel HIV pandemic amplifies the TB epidemic, with ongoing efforts around the world to tackle these potentially fatal diseases," says lead author Vegard Eldholm, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. "Among the estimated 1.5 million people who died from TB in 2015, about 200,000 cases involved multidrug-resistant TB and 400,000 were HIV co-infected. However, it is not clear exactly how much of an effect HIV has had on drug resistance in the most common form of TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb)." To explore the impact of HIV co-infection on Mtb drug resistance, Eldholm and his team analysed the genomes of 252 TB isolates from patients belonging to the largest outbreak of multidrug-resistant...