Free Republic

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis. The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a...

There may be as many as 300,000 new cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis a year in the world, and 79 percent of them are "superstrains," resistant to any three of the four first-line drugs, a World Health Organization survey has found. Patients in the former Soviet bloc countries are 10 times as likely to have drug-resistant strains as those elsewhere in the world, the survey said. The researchers said the drug-resistance problem might be much bigger than they could measure, particularly in countries like India and China, where they had surveyed only a few areas, and in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria and...