As Covid rages, the world is at risk of losing an increase in tuberculosis

Issuance: March 24, 2021-03:54Change: March 24, 2021-03: 52

Paris (AFP)

In the year Covid-19 turned the world over, the diagnosis and treatment of another serious lung disease, tuberculosis, plummeted, and experts fear that progress in its pandemic efforts will be lost.

Although tuberculosis is treatable and easy to diagnose, it was the world’s largest infection killer until the advent of Covid-19, killing 1.4 million people and infecting more than 10 million people each year.

Tuberculosis has been with humans for thousands of years, but the progress towards eradicating this preventable disease is daunting, with the overwhelming majority of cases occurring in developing countries.

For World Tuberculosis Day on Wednesday, Stop TB Partnership warned that the blockade and medical intervention caused by Covid-19 reduced the treatment and diagnosis of tuberculosis by 23%.

It essentially returns the world to the battle to eradicate the world’s murderers 12 years ago.

Lucica Ditiu, Secretary-General of the Tuberculosis Partnership, said:

“In the process, we endangered the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.”

-Worse than afraid-

At the start of the pandemic, modeling by Johns Hopkins University showed that a three-month blockade followed by a ten-month interruption in medical services would result in an additional 6.3 million TB of cases by 2025.

At the same time, the model showed that 1.4 million people would die of the disease.

Experts now admit that the situation is much worse than the situation envisioned in the Johns Hopkins simulation.

According to statistics from the nine highest-incidence countries of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, Tajikistan and Ukraine, the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis has already decreased by a total of 1 million people.

Also, new studies in India and South Africa show that people suffering from tuberculosis are three times more likely to die if infected with Covid-19.

“The effects of Covid-19 go far beyond the deaths and illnesses caused by the virus itself,” said Tedros Adhanom Gebreez, Executive Director of the World Health Organization, this week.

“The disruption of essential services for TB patients is just one of the tragic examples of how a pandemic is disproportionately affecting the poorest people in the world who are already at high risk for tuberculosis.”

Jose Luis Castro, president and CEO of global health organization Vital Strategies, told AFP that the impact of Covid-19 on tuberculosis will be felt “for the long time to come.”

“Covid-19 shows how interrelated we are all,” he said.

“No one is safe until we are all safe. We can see our vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities to deadly viruses that are very easily transmitted from person to person. This is almost the case. It’s a new experience for people. “

-“Terrible Financing”-

More than 75 candidate Covid-19 vaccines are currently on the market or under development, according to WHO figures.

It wasn’t this time last year.

The Stop TB partnership states that a new tuberculosis vaccine is under development, but at current funding levels it will not be online until 2027 at the earliest.

By that time, millions more will have died.

According to Castro, funding for the new tuberculosis vaccine is currently around $ 100 million, one-tenth of funding for HIV vaccine research.

“We will never develop an effective tuberculosis vaccine pipeline at the current worst funding levels,” he said.

Thokozile Phili Nkhoma, a board member of the Stop TB Partnership and a representative of the community, compared the world’s response to two different respiratory illnesses.

“In less than a year, the vaccine was developed and is now being deployed to contain and hopefully end Covid-19,” she said.

“But tuberculosis has existed since the days of Pharaoh, but the only vaccine approved is 100 years old and does not work perfectly. First-line tuberculosis treatment is decades ago and drug resistance It is increasing.

“Millions of undiscovered and untreated TB patients are still at risk of spreading TB.”

© 2021 AFP