Tomorrow is World Stop TB Day, renamed this year from the less-powerful World TB Day.
You may think that tuberculosis is a disease that has been beaten, but it has not. One person in three on the planet carries the TB bacillus, though in most people it lies dormant, waiting its chance. The opportunity often comes when the carrier is stricken with HIV/Aids; as the immune system weakens, TB emerges into terrifying activity - the victim will usually die within weeks if not treated. As a result of the continuing spread of Aids, particularly in Africa, TB is on the increase: 9 million people a year are newly infected, 2 million die. Even in this country, 7,000 cases a year are reported, though deaths are mercifully rare.
TB should not be the problem that it is. Drugs exist with 90+% cure rates, costing about US$11 for a full course. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has a standard anti-TB strategy, known as DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short course) which is working well in a steadily increasing number of countries. All that is needed is the funding, and even here there is a well-oiled mechanism, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria - but, as with so many development initiatives, the Global Fund is kept starved of the money it needs to do the job. The result, with all three diseases, is millions of unnecessary deaths and - for TB particularly - the risk of multi-drug resistant (MDR) strains developing. These are a hundred times as expensive to treat, with only about a 50% cure rate, so they are effectively a death sentence in the developing world. MDR-TB is on the increase in Eastern Europe, so its arrival here is likely sooner or later.
In January the Stop TB Partnership launched a 167 page document, the Global Plan to Stop TB, while last week the WHO launched a Global Strategy to stop TB. Click here to download the Plan document, or here to see the Strategy.
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