Note: World Lung Foundation united with The Union North America. From January 2016, the combined organization is known as “Vital Strategies.”
(New York, USA) – World Lung Foundation (WLF) today warned that the global health community’s opportunity to eradicate Tuberculosis (TB) soon will be gone – for the time being at least. The organization also warned that the price of continued inertia – including the loss of economic activity due to illness and death from TB and the cost of treating an increasing number of cases of MDR-TB – will dwarf any investment that donors, pharmaceutical companies and governments could currently be making to address the disease.
In 2011, 8.7 million people were infected and 1.4 million people died from TB, making it second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest killer worldwide due to a single infectious agent. The lack of aggressive targets and funding for TB diagnosis and treatment systems and for the development of new vaccines and drug therapies means common TB continues to infect millions of people every year. The number of Multi-Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB) cases continues to rise because drug sensitive TB is not being dealt with effectively; in 2011 3.7 percent of new TB cases and 20 percent of cases that received prior treatment are estimated to have multiple drug resistant TB (MDR-TB). Treating MDR-TB can cost ten times as much as treating common drug susceptible strains.
The World Health Organization and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria estimate US$1.6 billion is needed to adequately address the TB crisis.
Dr Neil Schluger, Chief Scientific Officer, World Lung Foundation, commented: “Systemic complacency from national governments, the international community, and the pharmaceutical industry has resulted in a failure to address common TB. Now the disease is mutating beyond our capacity to cure it. More money is required to combat TB before a tipping point is reached for the exponential spread of MDR-TB, which is more deadly and massively more expensive to treat.
“Governments, donors and corporations need to understand that such investment is in their own best interests. For rich countries, TB is largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Expenditure to improve the diagnosis and treatment of TB will easily be outweighed by economic benefits to national economies and in turn the global economy. Hope is not lost, but it will take a serious injection of commitment and funding to overcome this worsening problem and relentless advocacy to hold all the parties to account.”
Around one-third of the world’s population is estimated to carry latent TB and one-tenth of people infected with the disease will fall ill with TB during their lifetime. TB is most likely to strike people during their most productive years – between the ages of 25 and 40 – and is most prevalent among the poorest populations.