This brings to eight the number of people identified with "extremely drug-resistant" TB - XDR-TB - in the province so far.

Dr Keith Cloete, director of TB for the province, said a 23-year-old Cape Town woman had died in the Brooklyn Chest Hospital on February 5, but XDR-TB had only been diagnosed after death.

Last year this strain killed more than 50 people in KwaZulu-Natal and more than 300 cases have been confirmed countrywide.

Four of the five new local cases have been admitted to Brooklyn Chest Hospital, where they are being treated in isolation along with the first two cases, an 11-month-old baby from Khayelitsha and a 43-year-old woman from the Eastern Cape, who fell ill while visiting Cape Town over Christmas.

Cloete said the fact that the two original patients were doing well on treatment in the Brooklyn Chest Hospital could indicate a less severe strain of the disease in the Western Cape.

The fifth case of XDR-TB is an inmate at Brandvlei prison in Worcester, who, Cloete said, was "being managed in isolation" and did not pose a risk to the other prisoners.

The woman who died in Brooklyn Chest Hospital is believed to have been treated for the slightly less dangerous multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) at the time of her death.

Cloete said the four new cases being treated at the hospital were another 23-year-old woman from Cape Town, a 38-year-old woman from Vredenburg on the West Coast, a 26-year-old woman from Graafwater in the Cederberg and a 27-year-old man from Cape Town.

He said tests had been conducted on all the relatives and close contacts of the XDR-TB patients to ensure that the disease had not spread.

The cases appeared not to be linked to one another.

The latest cases have emerged after Western Cape health authorities started examining all multi-drug-resistant TB patients across the province last October, in a bid to determine whether any actually had XDR-TB. - This article was originally published on page 1 of The Cape Argus on February 20, 2007

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