XDR-TB in South Africa: No Time for Denial or Complacency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On September 1, 2006, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that a deadly new strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) had been detected in Tugela Ferry (Figure 1), a rural town in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) [1], the epicentre of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Of the 544 patients studied in the area in 2005, 221 had multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), that is, Mycobacterium tuberculosis that is resistant to at least rifampicin and isoniazid. Of these 221 cases, 53 were identified as XDR-TB (see Table 1 and [2]), i.e., MDR-TB plus resistance to at least three of the six classes of second-line agents [3]. This reportedly represents almost \none-sixth of all known XDR-TB cases reported worldwide [4]. Of the 53, 44 were tested for HIV and all were HIV infected. The median survival from the time of sputum specimen collection was 16 days for 52 of the 53 infected individuals, including six health workers and those reportedly taking antiretrovirals [2]. Such a fatality rate for XDR-TB, especially within such a relatively short period of time, is unprecedented \nanywhere in the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".