ABOUT 6,000 people in Shenzhen contracted tuberculosis (TB) last year, according to the Shenzhen Center for Control and Prevention of Chronic Diseases, which released the figure Tuesday, the 25th World Tuberculosis Day.

Among them, a family of six was diagnosed with drug-tolerant TB in 2019, Shenzhen Evening News said in a report last week.

According to the News report, the household’s 15-year-old son started coughing one year after his father fell sick with the chronic disease. Symptoms experienced by the teenager, identified as Wang, included coughing up phlegm and fatigue. In light of his father’s TB diagnosis, Wang saw a doctor and was soon also diagnosed with the chronic disease.

Wang later learned he had been infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis and developed a resistance to at least one of the anti-TB drugs available at the city’s control and prevention center for chronic diseases.

Wang’s three elder sisters and his mother all tested positive for TB after Wang’s diagnosis. According to doctors at the chronic disease control and prevention center, it is difficult and costly to treat a patient with drug-resistant TB and usually takes over a year for such a patient to recover. Most such patients have strong adverse drug reactions, and only 50 percent of them are able to make a full recovery.

Patients with drug-resistant TB are usually administered a cocktail of up to five kinds of anti-TB drugs during treatment. If a patient doesn’t strictly follow the prescribed treatment, drug resistance can increase, making the TB even more difficult to cure, the doctors said.

Shenzhen carried out three large-scale epidemiological surveys on TB in 1991, 2000 and 2010. The number of TB infections reduced by 83.9 percent from 1991 to 2010 thanks to an effective TB control and prevention program that encourages early diagnosis and offers free treatment. (Claudia Wei)