War as a Driver in Tuberculosis Evolution

by Michelle Ziegler

Russia has been all over the news lately. Beyond our recent election, increased Russian activity on the world stage has public health consequences for Europe and farther afield. It has been known for a long time that post-Soviet Russia had and continues to have serious public health problems. One of their particular problems that they have shared with the world is their alarmingly high rate of antibiotic resistant tuberculosis. There is no mystery over the root cause of their antibiotic resistance woes — poor antibiotic stewardship (Garrett, 2000; Bernard et al 2013).

A study by Vegard Eldholm and colleagues that came out this fall sheds light on the origins of particularly virulent tuberculosis strains with high rates of antibiotic resistance that recently entered Europe.  A large outbreak among Afghan refugees and Norwegians in Oslo, Norway, provided a core set of 26 specimens for this study that could be compared with results generated elsewhere in Europe (Eldholm et al, 2010). The Oslo outbreak clearly fits within the Russian clade A group that is concentrated to the east of the Volga River in countries of the former Soviet Union. They name this cluster the Central Asian Clade, noting that it co-localizes with region of origin of migrants carrying the MDR strains of tuberculosis reported in Europe.

Figure 5. Phylogeny of the Afghan Strain Family (ASF). Colored boxes represent the country of origin: Afghanistan is orange; other countries are gray. (Eldholm et al, 2016)

When the Oslo samples are added to the family tree, phylogeny, of recent tuberculosis isolates from elsewhere in Europe a distinctive pattern emerges. The branches on the family tree are short and dense, suggesting that this is recent diversity, that they calculate to have occurred within approximately the last twenty years (Eldholm et al, 2016).

The Central Asian Clade spread into Afghanistan before drug resistance began to develop, probably during the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) producing the Afghan Strain Diversity clade. Slightly later, the Central Asian Clade still in the former Soviet states begins to accumulate antibiotic resistance as the public health infrastructure crumbles in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. The invasion of Afghanistan by the US and its allies in 2002 toppled the Afghan state, crippling infrastructure and spurring refugee movements within and out of Afghanistan. The lack of modern public health standards in Afghanistan since their war with the introduction of these strains by the Soviets in the 1980s provided fertile ground for the establishment and diversity of tuberculosis in the country. Instability has been pervasive throughout the entire region sending refugees and economic migrants from both Afghanistan and the former Soviet states into Europe.

Movements of the Central Asian Clade (CAC) since c. 1960 and the subsequent Afghan Strain Family (ASF). (Eldholm et al, 2016)

Their dating of the last common ancestor for the Central Asian Clade to c. 1961 is significantly younger than the previous dating of 4,415 years before present for the Russian clade A (CC1) of the Beijing lineage of Mycobacteria tuberculosis. They account for this difference by noting differences in their methods of assessing sequence differences and note that their method is in line with other recent evolutionary rates for other tuberculosis clades.  The diagnosis dates and length of the arms on their reconstructed phylogeny suggests that there were multiple, independent introductions of the cases from Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics. This is consistent with a repeated periods of refugee movements from central Asia into Europe.

The rapid proliferation and diversification of the Afghan Strain Family may be explained by a known syndemic between tuberculosis and war (Ostrach & Singer, 2013). Conditions of war everywhere disrupt food systems, destroy critical infrastructures such as electricity and water systems, interrupts medical supplies, and the human public health infrastructure of the country. Malnutrition and stress are known contributors to immune suppression. Many pathogens flourish simultaneously in these conditions increasing the infectious challenges the population must fend off. Diarrheal diseases are the most acute and demanding of rapid attention, allowing longer-term diseases like tuberculosis to slip through the overburdened healthcare system. Afghanistan has experienced nearly forty years of war, political instability, and repeated infrastructure destruction. Thus, they were primed for both the establishment of new tuberculosis strains during the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s along with the proliferation and diversification of tuberculosis during the Afghan-American war of the last sixteen years.

Established syndemics between tuberculosis and war have been made retrospectively following the Vietnam war and the Persian Gulf war of 1991 (Ostrach & Singer, 2013). In Vietnam, prolonged malnutrition caused an eruption of tuberculosis along with malaria, leprosy, typhoid, cholera, plague, and parasitic diseases.  A WHO survey in 1976 found that Vietnam had twice the incidence of tuberculosis over all of its neighboring countries (Ostrach & Singer, 2013). When the military intentionally targets water infrastructure as it did in Vietnam and Iraq, the production of civilian infectious disease is a tactic of war. In both Vietnam and post-Gulf war Iraq, more civilians died of malnutrition and infectious disease than enemy soldiers died of all causes (Ostrach & Singler, 2013).

It seems likely that this is just one of the first studies to establish a link between serious infectious disease developments and the Afghan wars. The current war zones throughout central Asia and the Middle East already have ramifications for the public health of the entire world that walls along borders will not be able to stop. Most of the cases in the Oslo outbreak were Norwegians, not Afghan immigrants. Diseases will spread beyond the migrants so country of origin screening will be of little use before long.

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Reference

Eldholm, V., Pettersson, J. H. O., Brynildsrud, O. B., Kitchen, A., Rasmussen, E. M., Lillebaek, T., et al. (2016). Armed conflict and population displacement as drivers of the evolution and dispersal of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 201611283–16. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1611283113

Ostrach, B., & Singer, M. C. (2013). Syndemics of War: Malnutrition-Infectious Disease Interactions and the Unintended Health Consequences of Intentional War Policies. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 36(2), 257–273. http://doi.org/10.1111/napa.12003

Bernard, C., Brossier, F., Sougakoff, W., Veziris, N., Frechet-Jachym, M., Metivier, N., et al. (2013). A surge of MDR and XDR tuberculosis in France among patients born in the Former Soviet Union. Euro Surveillance: Bulletin Européen Sur Les Maladies Transmissibles = European Communicable Disease Bulletin, 18(33), 20555.