Leading killer infectious diseases are mutating at an alarming rate, possibly because of the overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to eliminate them. The problem has been fueled worldwide by everything from counterfeit drugmakers to the unintended consequences of giving drugs to people without properly monitoring their treatment. Some of the damage that’s been done:

• In Cambodia, scientists have confirmed the emergence of a new drug-resistant form of malaria. If the only affordable treatment for malaria — artemisinin — stops working, there’s no good replacement to combat a disease that kills 1 million annually. “The drug has been around for a long time and misused for a long time, and this is all encouraging the parasite to develop resistance,” said Dr. Delia Bethell, of the U.S. Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Science.

• In Africa, new and harder-to-treat strains of HIV are being detected in about 5 percent of new patients. Ten years ago, between 1 percent and 5 percent of HIV patients worldwide had drug-resistant strains. Now, between 5 percent and 30 percent of new patients are already resistant to the drugs.

• A new strain of an extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis has appeared for the first time in the United States. The so-called XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it. Drug-resistant TB is a “time bomb,” said Dr. Masae Kawamura, who heads the Francis J. Curry National Tuberculosis Center in San Francisco, “a man-made problem that is costly, deadly, debilitating, and the biggest threat to our current TB control strategies.”

• Also in the U.S., drug-resistant infections killed more than 65,000 people last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. More than 19,000 people died from a staph infection that has been eliminated in Norway, where antibiotics are stringently limited.

— The Associated Press

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