Tuberculosis

March 24th was World Tuberculosis day, however, unsurprisingly it was greatly overran by Covid-19 news coverage. In fact, in almost every article I read about TB, coronavirus was included as either a comparison or a reminder of how weak our immune systems really are to novel pathogens. According to an article published by Infection Control Today, named “Beware of the World’s Most Deadly Infectious Disease: Tuberculosis,” 10 million people had it in 2018, and 4 million people in 2020 will die from it. The article also reports that the 10 million cases (1.5 million deaths) in 2018 from TB has declined from 2% and 5% respectively since 2017 This can possibly be attributed to extra measures and can indicate their positive effect, giving health care providers and public health officials more incentives to keep fighting this disease.

Additionally, according to an article published called “Tuberculosis is the World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease,” tuberculosis kills more people than any other infectious disease. The deaths from Tuberculosis every day amount to about 4,000. Tb is difficult to treat because medications have to be taken over 6 months including a cocktail of four different antibiotics. Many patients develop resistant to Tb medication which prolongs and complicates treatment measures, and can increase transmission. As we learned in class, there is MDR, XDR, and TDR resistant strains of TB which poses a huge health crisis since antibiotics are having less and less success.

Moving forward, a statement released by the WHO places time as a central theme in treating TB. They aim to “accelerate the TB response to save lives and end suffering, building on a high level commitments by the Heads of State at the 2018 UN High-Level Meeting on TB.” This plan includes scaling up access, treatment, and prevention to ensure more resources are dedicated to TB research. They also want to ensure that there is a global strategy to control the disease that is responsible for huge social burdens. This task might implement community-wide screening regardless of symptoms in some areas of the world.