First of all, like my predecessor, I'm not a doctor but an administrator at best. There's a difference between multidrug resistant and extensively drug resistant. In the current first-line treatment, if you have regular TB, you treat that with four drugs in a regimen that lasts six months and those four drugs were developed in 1976 when that regimen came together. We've been working for the last 50 years with that treatment.
If you're resistant to at least two of the first-line drugs, you're considered multidrug resistant. There's a class of mono-resistance, and what is currently being recognized by WHO is that even people who are resistant to just one of the four drugs are already significantly worse off in their treatment outcomes than patients who are resistant to at least two drugs. But if you're two drugs, you're getting into multidrug resistance and what is going to be used then is what's called second-line drugs. These are drugs that have some known activity against TB, but they are significantly worse off. As I mentioned, you need daily injections for six months. Your prior esteemed colleague talked about walking around for two months with an injection. Multidrug-resistant patients go to a clinic every day for six months to get an injection, and on top of that take five or six pills. You see behind me here on the picture a hand that is holding one day of drugs for multidrug-resistant TB.
When you then also have resistance to one of those second-line drugs, you come into the territory of extensively drug-resistant TB. That's the third layer of resistance where even the second-line drugs, our fallback drugs that are already absolutely not great and only have 50% success rate around the world in terms of treating patients, are no longer working. Then you really get a kitchen sink of any type of antibiotic that might have some degree of success, which means that you're working between normally three and five years if you're lucky enough to survive. About 30% of patients survive extensively drug-resistant TB around the world, so 70% of patients die. Those are the three levels.
How common is it? Around the world, around 9% of patients now are multidrug-resistant. As I mentioned before, the number of deaths is about 240,000 but the number of new patients every year is about 600,000, according to the World Health Organization, out of the 10 million people infected every year. Sorry, that's about 6%. Within that group, about 30,000 new infections globally are with this extensively drug-resistant TB, so these are the patients who are the worst off, who are the most infectious because we have no way to treat them and therefore they will remain infectious.
In Canada, a case of XDR would be extremely rare. I think there has been one or two cases in the last five or six years. Multidrug-resistant TB is a bit more common. There's a handful of cases every year. However, obviously with that complexity, it makes dealing with that situation extremely hard. As you mentioned, an indigenous community in the northern territories actually has a rate of TB that is very comparable to some parts of Africa.
It's only because Canada is such a big country and has such a great health care system overall that the number of patients in the indigenous communities is not recognized for the effect it has. They are actually in a fairly severe situation, and your prior colleague mentioned one of these issues as trying to actually diagnose that, diagnosing patients, and then diagnosing their resistance pattern so that we can treat them well.