Over a 2-year period of a population study carried out on the civilian population of the Murmansk region, the resistance of tuberculous mycobacteria and the molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis were studied. For the period 2003-2004 M. strains were collected tuberculosis in tuberculosis patients who obtained positive culture results. A total of 1,226 M. isolates were tested during the work tuberculosis.

The prevalence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis was extremely high: for example, out of 439 new tuberculosis cases, 114 (26%) were due to multidrug-resistant strains and, among 787 previously treated patients, resistant isolates at least isoniazid and rifampicin were isolated from 574 patients, or 72.9% cases. Spoligotyping of primary multidrug-resistant strains (a typing method based on DNA polymorphism Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and is a valuable tool in the study of the epidemiology of tuberculosis) has shown that most isolates have the Beijing SIT1 genotype (n = 91, 79.8%) The isolates with this genotype were further analyzed using the RFLP IS6110 typing method. Sequencing of gene fragments associated with resistance to rifampicin and isoniazid has shown that the multidrug-resistant M. tuberculosis strains are very homogeneous, since 78% of the multi-resistant SIT1 strains had the same mutations that provoked resistance.

Thus, the results of this study demonstrated that the genetic homogeneity of the multidrug-resistant strains of mycobacterium tuberculosis in Murmansk suggests that these isolates are actively distributed in the region.