Even as two cases of Totally Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (TDR-TB) have been detected in Bangalore, one of the patients is missing. This poses a grave threat of rapidly spreading the deadliest strain of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes the disease.

A 56-year-old man has been missing for two weeks as he has not turned up at Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Chest Diseases (RGICD) for treatment and may be a cause of concern in the city. “TB can spread fast. A person with TB, if not treated, can spread it to 10 other people around him, on average,” said Shashidhar Buggi, director of SDS

Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases Hospital and RGICD.Now, this patient is like a ticking time-bomb. And nobody is coming forward to inform the authorities about his whereabouts, or if he has died.

“We don’t know why he stopped coming to the hospital. But we have not seen him in two weeks. We are now considering operating the other patient (a 29-year-old woman) depending on her condition. But for now, we have no news of the other patient,” he said.

The absconding patient is said to have been taking treatment for TB at the RGICD for two years. “We had two cases of TB, for which we had been giving treatment for more than eight months. We sent their phlegm for testing in Chennai, where it was confirmed that both have developed Extreme Drug Resistance. After another six to eight months of treatment, it was found that they were suffering from Multi-Drug Resistance (MDR),” Buggi said.

It has been two years since the two patients started treatment for MDR. Buggi said the RGICD had recently sent samples of phlegm for testing at Chennai’s Intermediate Reference lab; out of the 10 samples, two were confirmed to have TDR.