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In the year since Covid-19 circled the world, the diagnosis and treatment of another serious lung disease, tuberculosis, has plummeted, leaving experts fearful that progress in fighting will be lost. the pandemic.
Tuberculosis can be easily treated and diagnosed, but until Covid-19 emerged, it was the world’s leading infectious cause of death, causing 1.4 million deaths each year and infecting more than 10 million people.
Although tuberculosis has been present in humans for millennia, progress towards eradicating this preventable disease has been painstaking, with the overwhelming majority of cases occurring in developing countries.
In the run-up to World Tuberculosis Day on Wednesday, the Stop TB Partnership warned that Covid-19-driven shutdowns and healthcare interventions had seen a 23 percent drop in TB treatment and diagnosis. .
That essentially sets the world back 12 years in its fight to root out the global killer.
“Twelve years of impressive progress in the fight against TB, including reducing the number of people who miss out on TB care, have been tragically reversed by another virulent respiratory infection,” said Lucica Ditiu, Executive Director of the Stop TB Partnership .
“In the process, we endanger the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.”
Worse than feared
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Johns Hopkins University model showed that a three-month lockdown followed by 10 months of health service outage would lead to an additional 6.3 million TB cases by 2025.
In the same period, 1.4 million people would die from the disease, the model showed.
Experts now acknowledge that the situation is far worse than predicted in the Johns Hopkins simulation.
Statistics from the nine highest incidence countries (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, Tajikistan, and Ukraine) showed that TB diagnosis and treatment has already decreased by a total of one million people.
And new studies from India and South Africa show that people with TB are three times more likely to die if they become infected with Covid-19.
“The effects of Covid-19 go far beyond death and illness caused by the virus itself,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this week.
“The disruption of essential services for people with TB is just one tragic example of the ways the pandemic is disproportionately affecting some of the world’s poorest people, who were already at higher risk of contracting TB.”
José Luis Castro, president and CEO of the global health organization Vital Strategies, said that the impact of Covid-19 on tuberculosis would be felt “for a long time.”
“Covid-19 has shown how interconnected we are all,” he said.
“No one is safe until we are all safe. We can see our fragility and vulnerability to a deadly virus that spreads very, very easily from person to person. That is a new experience for most people. “
According to WHO figures, there are currently more than 75 potential Covid-19 vaccines on the market or in development.
This time last year, there were none.
The Stop TB Partnership says that while a new TB vaccine is in the works, at current funding levels it won’t be available until 2027 at the earliest.
By then, millions more will have died.
“But although tuberculosis has existed since the time of the pharaohs, the only approved vaccine is 100 years old and it doesn’t work at all. First-line treatment for tuberculosis is decades old, and drug resistance is on the rise.
“The millions of people with tuberculosis who are not found or received treatment remain at risk of spreading the disease.”
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