Abstract: Objective  To understand the epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis(TB) under the DOTS (directly observed treatment short-course)implementation in Xinmi county of Henan province. Methods According to the inclusion criteria defined by the guidelines for national drug-resistant tuberculosis baseline survey, a total of 333 cases, including 295 cases of new and 38 cases of retreatment smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients, were enrolled successively for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) surveillance from March 1, 2007 to February 28, 2010; 100,135 and 98 cases in each year respectively. According to the criteria set by the quality control manual for national drug-resistant tuberculosis baseline survey, sputum culture and strain identification were done for the included patients. All the contaminated samples,  those that did not grow and those were not Mycobacterium tuberculosis were ruled out. 296 isolated strains were acquired eventually, including 261 strains from new cases and 35 strains from retreatment cases. These strains were performed first line TB drugs (INH, RFP, EMB, S) susceptibility test. Results The overall smear positive drug-resistant rate were 28.57%（26/91）, 30.43%（35/115）, 27.78%（25/90）and multidrug-resistant rate were 5.49%（5/91）, 7.83%（9/115）, 4.44%（4/90）for 3 years respectively. Among the 86 drug-resistant Mtb strains isolated from the smear positive TB patients, 47 strains（15.88%，47/296）resisted to one kind of drugs, 20 strains （6.76%，20/296）resisted to two kinds of drugs, 12 strains（4.05%，12/296）resisted to three kinds of drugs, 7 strains（2.36%，7/296）resisted to four kinds of drugs, 18 strains（6.08%，18/296） resisted to both RFP and INH. Conclusion  The epidemic of MDR-TB was lower than that of the whole country. The epidemic remained in the same level in Xinmi county in the past 3 years. Effective measures to detect and treat drug-resistant TB patients should be taken to reduce the rate of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Key words: Tuberculosis, pulmonary/drug therapy, Drug resistance, multiple, bacterial, Microbial sensitivity tests, Xinmi city