Health professionals gather for TB summit

| The New Mexican

3/22/2008 - 3/22/08

New Mexico health professionals are dealing with fewer cases of tuberculosis this year than last but remain vigilant for the disease.

They plan to meet Monday — World Tuberculosis Day — at The University of New Mexico for a tuberculosis summit.

Department of Health Secretary Dr. Alfredo Vigil will speak at the conference, which will be in part to discuss a possible tuberculosis archive at UNM.

The archive would keep track of various TB strains and be accessible online to TB researchers, said Dr. Marcos Burgos, the medical director for the tuberculosis program at the Department of Health.

"It will help us create better tools to fight this disease, from the diagnostic perspective, the treatment perspective as well as the development of vaccines," he said.

Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe are also involved in the project, he said.

The state has 44 active cases of tuberculosis. Last year, there were 51, according to department figures.

Burgos said there is an increasing number of drug-resistant tuberculosis cases.

Some cases are resistant to multiple drugs and can start at $100,000 to treat, he said.

"It can bankrupt the budget of programs that treat tuberculosis," he said.

The summit is sponsored by Results Albuquerque, a group working to end poverty.