Australian woman dies from drug resistant TB
18 May 2013
NATHAN PAULL | AAP
A TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER WOMAN has died from an apparent drug resistant strain of tuberculosis, becoming the first Australian in several years to succumb to the disease.
Queensland's chief health officer Jeanette Young yesterday confirmed the 20-year-old's death on 25 April.
Dr Young says it is yet to be determined how the woman contracted the illness but she frequently visited Papua New Guinea which has one of the world's highest incident rates.
She says it is likely her particular infection became resistant to medication because she probably had a lapse in treatment rather than contracting a super-strain from somebody else.
"That's the most likely scenario here, but until we've done all our testing I'm hypothesising a bit, which I don't like to do," she said.
Dr Young said the woman's death was the first case in recent history of someone from Australia dying from TB.
"It's rare in Australia to contract TB in the first place and it's also then very rare to die of complications due to TB," she said.
Additional tests are being carried out to confirm whether the woman had multi-resistant drug tuberculosis.
A young woman from Papua New Guinea died in Cairns in March after contracting a drug-resistant strain of TB.
Fears had been raised that the closure of tuberculosis clinics last year in the Torres Strait for Papua New Guineans would lead to an outbreak of the disease in Queensland.
However, Dr Young said at the time there was no threat of that happening as the federal government's AusAID program in PNG has reduced the risk of people with tuberculosis coming into Australia.
Come on Dr Young. Blame it on PNG again. She is an Australian citizen and she died in an Australian hospital.
Go jump in the lake, and stop finding a scapegoat! Admit failure and set up measures to improve.
Posted by: Steven Gimbo | 21 May 2013 at 07:51 AM