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<p>Cruz was taken into custody on Monday night during a traffic stop in the community of Lamont, California, about 15 miles north of Bakersfield, Kern County Sheriff's spokesman Ray Pruitt said.</p> <p>"We took him to Kern Medical Center and had him admitted there, under guard," Pruitt said.</p>

The world is starting to win the war against tuberculosis, but drug-resistant forms pose a new threat. If there was any doubt that tuberculosis (TB) was fighting back, it was dispelled in 2005, at the Church of Scotland Hospital in the village of Tugela Ferry, South Africa. Doctors at the hospital, in a rough, remote corner of KwaZulu-Natal province, were hardened to people dying from gunshots and AIDS. But even they were puzzled and frightened when patients with HIV who were responding well to antiretroviral drugs began dying — rapidly — from TB. With ordinary TB, patients start to feel...

Scientists of the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine have breathed new life into a forgotten technique and so succeeded in detecting resistant tuberculosis in circumstances where so far this was hardly feasible. Tuberculosis bacilli that have become resistant against our major antibiotics are a serious threat to world health. If we do not take efficient and fast action, 'multiresistant tuberculosis' may become a worldwide epidemic, wiping out all medical achievements of the last decades. A century ago tuberculosis was a lugubrious word, more terrifying than 'cancer' is today. And rightly so. Over the nineteenth and twentieth century it took a...

This Ancient, Deadly Disease Is Still Killing In Europe John Donnelly, GlobalPost Dec. 30, 2011, 12:53 PM GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world. Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for...

Multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis (TB) are spreading at an alarming rate in Europe and will kill thousands unless health authorities halt the pandemic... "TB is an old disease that never went away, and now it is evolving with a vengeance," said Zsuzsanna Jakab, the WHO's Regional Director for Europe... TB is currently a worldwide pandemic that kills around 1.7 million people a year. The infection is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis and destroys patients' lung tissue, causing them to cough up the bacteria, which then spreads through the air and can be inhaled by others. Cases...

Enlarge ImageBreathtaking discovery? TB hospitals like this one in Guatemala increasingly see patients with drug-resistant strains and badly need new options. Credit: Malcolm Linton Thanks to a barroom conversation, researchers may have stumbled on a powerful drug combination to battle antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis (TB), a growing threat throughout the world. New work suggests that meropenem and clavulanate, both of which are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to fight bacterial infections, tame some of the most virulent TB strains. An increasing number of people have multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis. Last year, the World...

A new test that can detect multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis in two days instead of the standard two to three months promises to help significantly improve treatment and prevent the spread of the airborne infection, the World Health Organization said on Monday. Multiple-drug-resistant TB, or MDR-TB, is a growing public health problem in the world. Five percent of new TB cases are resistant to first-line drugs. That is 450,000 of the nine million new TB cases that are detected each year, the W.H.O. says. In the United States, the prevalence of drug-resistant tuberculosis among foreign-born TB patients has been about 1.5 percent,...

AP Medical Writer Drug-resistant tuberculosis is spreading even faster than medical experts had feared, the World Health Organization warned in report issued Tuesday. The rate of TB patients infected with the drug-resistant strain topped 20 percent in some countries, the highest ever recorded, the U.N. agency said. "Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to see rates like this," said Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of WHO's "Stop TB" department. "This demonstrates what happens when you keep making mistakes in TB treatment." Though the report is the largest survey of drug-resistant TB, based on information collected between 2002 and 2006,...