FIJI is experiencing an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis, with 13 cases recorded in just eight months this year and a two-year-old child among those who have died from the disease, the National TB Programme has confirmed.
Speaking during the Fiji Medical Association’s annual conference, National TB Programme Control Officer Dr Luse Buinimasi said the program had gone from seeing one case a year, or none for several years, to now recording almost two every month.
She said Fiji recorded 11 drug-resistant TB cases in 2025, but 13 cases had already been diagnosed between January 1 and August 31 this year.
Dr Buinimasi said more than 35 per cent of cases were new infections with no previous TB treatment or known risk factors, while more than 60 per cent had a history of TB treatment and had either failed or interrupted treatment before returning with resistant disease.
“We are already in that state of drug-resistant outbreak,” she said.
Drug-resistant TB occurs when TB bacteria no longer respond properly to medicines normally used to treat the disease.
“Most of them, by the time they are diagnosed, they’re already in the mortuary,” she said.
Dr Buinimasi said the youngest case involved a two-year-old child who died after developing drug-resistant TB. Both parents were also diagnosed with the disease and co-infected with HIV, while the oldest patient was 66 years old.
“If the HIV outbreak wasn’t there, maybe the picture would be slow,” she said.
She said cases had been detected through only eight diagnostic sites covering seven of Fiji’s 21 subdivisions, raising concerns that the reported figures may not reflect the full extent of the outbreak.
“If we had more diagnostic sites and everyone collected a sputum sample a day, this data would totally change,” she said.
