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Y. Hu [1; 2] and L. Xu [2; 3] and Y. L. He [2; 3] and Y. Pang [4] and N. Lu [2; 3] and J. Liu [1] and J. Shen [1] and D. M. Zhu [1] and X. Feng [1] and Y. W. Wang [5] and C. Yang [2; 3]

Academic Editor: Isabel Portugal

1, Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory, Chongqing Tuberculosis Control Institute, Chongqing 400050, China

2, Department of Pathogenic Organisms, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China, cqmu.edu.cn

3, Molecular Medicine and Cancer Research Center, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China, cqmu.edu.cn

4, National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory, National Center for TB Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China, chinacdc.cn

5, Chongqing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chongqing 400021, China

Received Feb 26, 2017; Revised May 28, 2017; Accepted Jun 18, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a public threat to human health around the whole world; WHO estimates that, in 2015, 10.4 million people became ill with active TB and 1.4 million died from the disease, making it the world’s leading cause of death by a single infectious agent [1]. In China, there are about 1.1 to 1.5 million new TB cases per year [2]. During the 1990s, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), defined as resistant to at least isoniazid and rifampin, emerged as a threat to TB control [3, 4]. Globally, 480,000 new TB cases (3.9%) are MDR-TB in 2015 [1]. In China, the proportion of MDR-TB cases is growing dramatically, and national survey estimated that there were 110,000 cases of MDR-TB and 8,200 cases of XDR-TB [5]. MDR-TB treatment requires the use of second-line drugs (SLDs) that are less effective, more toxic, and costlier than first-line isoniazid- and rifampin-based regimens. Recent studies have suggested that resistance to SLDs has arisen as a new threat [6–8], leading to extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), which has been found in 117 countries/regions thus far [1], and even so-called totally drug-resistant tuberculosis [6, 9].

There is a high incidence of TB in the Southwest of China. From 2014, local tuberculosis control agencies started the...
         
         
 
         
         
         
 
 
           
 
 
         
   
 
           
   
 

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