Multi drug-resistant tuberculosis remains at crisis levels, with about 480,000 new cases this year, and various forms of lung disease killed about 1.5 million people in 2013, the World Health Organisation said.
In recent years, the emergence of multi drug-resistant TB – a man-made problem caused by regular TB patients being given the wrong medicines, the wrong doses or failing to complete their treatment – has posed an increasing global threat.
About nine million people contracted tuber-culosis during the year and about 3.5 per cent of those had a strain that was to some extent drug-resistant – cases that are much harder to treat and have significantly poorer cure rates, it said.
“There are severe epidemics in some regions, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” the UN health agency said in its annual assessment of the global burden of TB, noting that in many places, the treatment success rate is “alarmingly low”.
There are severe epidemics in some regions, particularly Eastern Europe and Central Asia
Furthermore, extensively drug-resistant TB, which is even more expensive and difficult to treat than multi drug-resistant strain, has now been reported in 100 countries around the world.
Once known as the ‘white plague’ for its ability to render its victims skinny, pale and feverish, TB causes night sweats, persistent coughing, weight loss and blood in the phlegm or spit. It is spread through close contact with infected people.
Of all infectious diseases, only the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes Aids kills more people than TB.
The Geneva-based agency also warned that a lack of funding is hampering efforts to combat the global epidemic. An estimated $8 billion is needed each year to be able to tackle the disease fully, it said, and an annual shortfall of about $2 billion means that is not possible for now. However, efforts to better diagnose and treat the lung disease are beginning to pay off, the WHO said, noting such progress has saved circa 37 million lives since 2000.
While “a staggering number of lives are being lost to a curable disease”, the WHO said the TB death rate fell by 45 percent since 1990 and the number of people developing TB is declining by an average of 1.5 per cent a year.
A leading killer disease
• More than two billion people, or a third of the world’s population, are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes TB.
• Tuberculosis is the world’s seventh-leading cause of death. It is one of three primary diseases that are closely linked to poverty, the other two being Aids and malaria.
• Tuberculosis is spread easily through the air. When infectious people cough, sneeze, talk or spit, they expel the bacteria. Just a small amount is enough for transmission. Someone in the world is newly infected with TB every second.
• Nearly all TB infections are latent, with carriers showing no symptoms and they are not infectious. However, one in 10 will become sick with active TB in his or her lifetime due primarily to a weakened immune system.
• TB affects mostly young adults in their most productive years. The vast majority of TB deaths are in the developing world.
• TB is the seventh-highest cause of mortality in poor countries.
Sources: WHO, US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, The Lancet