Tuberculosis (TB)

Kazakhstan

The struggle to control M/XDR-TB

COUNTRY FACTS

  - Percentage of new TB patients with MDR-TB in 2008: 20%
  - Percentage of new TB patients also HIV-positive: 0.5%
  - Percentage of TB patients cured: 71%

A race to save lives

Daniyar Tapalov walks to his home in Dalgar, Kazakhstan, after receiving medicine at a nearby hospital for MDR-TB.
WHO/Dominic Chavez

Through the centuries, great powers have fought in this region over influence and resources, such as the modern scramble for vast energy supplies buried in Central Asian earth. But now an echo of those races is being waged here almost entirely out of view, one with thousands of lives at stake – the struggle to control both multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR -TB ) and the more serious extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR -TB.

Abylgazy Nagmadin is a patient at the National TB Center in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Dr Tamara Voshenkova, Vice -Minister of Public Health in Kazakhstan.
Cover of the book

COUNTRY STORIES

PERSPECTIVES

BACKGROUND