Tuberculosis
Anne Marson of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria catalogs stories of inspiration, strength and hope from a recent trip to Peru.
Photo credit: Anne Marson/ Friends of the Global Fight
In the US, tuberculosis is not a part of our everyday life. We take for granted being able to live free of this deadly disease -– so much so that most of us probably don’t fully understand what having a case of tuberculosis (TB) would be like. For the record, this serious lung infection leads to chest pain, coughing up blood, fever and for some –- particularly young children -– eventual death.
Unfortunately, these grisly details are a part of everyday life for many in Peru, where despite tremendous strides in the fight against the disease over the past two decades, TB is still a major public health problem. I recently had a chance to visit Peru, where I saw clearly that the reality of TB and its effects on productivity and livelihood is knit tightly into the fabric of almost every community.
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This week, ONE is joining 10 bloggers who are making their way through Kenya to see what life is really like for moms in the developing world. Follow along and check their progress at http://one.org/us/actnow/moms. Read the original version of this post here.
Did you know that 200 people die from tuberculosis around the world every hour? That’s nearly 2 million lives annually, and Kenya is leading the charge. It is the leading cause of death for people with HIV and one of the leading causes of death for women and children worldwide.
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Tonight, the Washington Global Health Alliance will be hosting a big event with A Party With A Purpose to help raise awareness for the tuberculosis vaccine. Even if you don’t live in Seattle, where the party is located, you can still learn more about the party — which is pretty cool in of itself!
A year has passed since the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010 tore through the streets of Haiti, yet a difficult truth remains; despite the millions of aid dollars pledged and the countless relief teams dispatched, Haiti is still devastated on many levels. One of the most serious aftershocks of the earthquake has been the surge in disease spread, making epidemics of diseases that were previously en route to being controlled.
One disease which has become a heightened concern since the earthquake is tuberculosis (TB). More than one third of the world’s population is infected with the bacteria that cause TB, making the disease a major global health concern. According to the World Health Organization, there are approximately 9 million new cases of TB each year, and close to half a million are resistant to multiple drugs that once effectively treated the disease. Two million people die of TB each year. Haiti is estimated to have the highest per capita TB burden in the Latin American and Caribbean region (USAID).
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John Keats, DH Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Henry David Thoreau. Famous poets that turned words to art. Sadly, they also had another thing in common: tuberculosis. In the late 1800s, TB was tearing through the US and Europe, causing many deaths.
Today is World TB Day, an opportunity to take stock of progress made in ridding the world of this horrible disease and also identifying opportunities to make more progress. For most of us, TB is not a big concern. Once in a while we get a scare –- remember that guy a few years back who flew back to the US even though he’d been diagnosed with infectious TB? -– but for the most part it’s a disease of the past.
Not so for many people living in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. About 2 million people die every year from TB, making it one of the world’s top killers. It’s become even more deadly with people with HIV, and is what causes most AIDS-related deaths in Africa.
“Without additional funding in the battle against tuberculosis for research, improved prevention, early diagnosis and treatment, some 8 million people will die from what is largely a curable disease between now and 2015,” according to a statement from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.
Thanks to a lot of work by partners across the world, there’s been great progress. More and more people are diagnosed and treated, and that’s thanks in large part to increased funding through the Global Fund -– a key focus of our ONE advocacy work. About two-thirds of all donor support for TB flows through the Global Fund, and this has helped many poor people get the treatment they need. There’s also a good strategy in place, thanks to the Stop TB Partnership, an active coalition of more than 1 thousand organizations working together to eliminate TB.
Still, there’s a lot more to do. On the prevention front, there’s still a shocking disconnect between HIV and TB services –- even though we know that the rate of TB is much higher, and more deadly, among people living with HIV. Those managing programs and funding need to do much more to ensure that HIV and TB are treated as one in the many countries where they’re raging together.
On the research front, there are some new diagnostic tools to help quickly identify people with active TB, including those that have developed drug-resistant TB (you get drug-resistant TB when the systems for providing regular TB fail, leaving patients vulnerable to mutating viruses that are harder and more expensive to treat). The Foundation for Innovative Diagnostics (FIND) has an active effort on TB that’s really focused on addressing real problems in developing countries that don’t have lots of expensive laboratories, microscopes, and trained personnel).
The world needs a vaccine for TB! There is one now, called BCG and developed about 90 years ago, and it’s used to protect infants but it doesn’t protect them from adult forms of TB and is only partially effective. The Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation is leading in this area; they’re hopeful that a vaccine will be ready by the end of the decade. Let’s hope they’re right!
So what can you do to save the poets of today and tomorrow? Help us keep up the pressure to fully fund the Global Fund. The fights still on, sadly, and it’s caught up in the big budget debates going on in many donor capitols. Join ONE, and respond when we ask –- we really do need your voice to help support political leaders to do the right thing.
Photo of Henry David Thoreau courtesy of Wikimedia commons
Jonathan Hale from USAID urges Americans to take decisive action and curb the spread or dangerous strains of tuberculosis for the sake of our national security. Read the original post on USAID’s blog, Impact.
Several weeks ago, I visited the Central Tuberculosis Research Institute (CTRI) of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow. It plays a central role in Russia’s battle with tuberculosis (TB) as the country’s top TB treatment hospital, research center, and medical training facility. Russians with the most difficult multi-drug resistant (MDR) – TB and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) -TB are treated there. I was struck by the determination of the Russian doctors in the face of the continued threat of MDR-TB and XDR-TB and I am glad that USAID counts them as partners in our common fight.
A TB patient receives care at the Central Tuberculosis Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow. Photo credit: David Grout/USAID Mission Russia
As we commemorate World Tuberculosis Day on March 24, it is important for all of us to recognize that Eastern Europe and Eurasia continue to have the highest rates of MDR-TB and XDR-TB infections in the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 12 countries have reported proportions of MDR-TB of 6% or more among new TB cases: all of these countries are in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Five countries report MDR-TB proportions of 50% or more among previously treated cases: all of these countries are also in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The WHO estimates that in Russia, 42.4% of previously treated TB cases are MDR-TB; in Azerbaijan, 55.8%; in Georgia, 27.4%; and in Ukraine, 44.3%.
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Today marks yet another moment in the “holidays without greeting cards” series: World Tuberculosis Day. Each year, there are 9 million new cases of TB and close to 2 million people die from the disease. An estimated 10 percent of people with TB also are co-infected with HIV, further compounding the diseases’ burden. Dr. Paul Nunn, a self-described “physician-turned-bureaucrat,” is responsible for coordinating TB control efforts throughout the WHO system — took some time to talk with me about his work on TB. I’ve taken the liberty of paraphrasing some of his answers below:
Today is World TB Day. What does that mean to you?
Travel! [Ed note: Dr. Nunn was off to mark World TB day with a speech at the Swiss Anti-Tuberculosis Association]. Besides that, I see it as a key advocacy moment to drive awareness of TB, highlight the progress we’ve made, and motivate the global community to do more on TB.
What sort of progress have we made on TB in the last decade?
There are still more than 9 million cases per year, but we have made significant progress. The incidence rate of TB flattened in 2004, and it has fallen (albeit fractionally) in the years since, in part thanks to the DOTS strategy. We’ve also significantly decreased the prevalence (total number of cases at any given time) and mortality from TB overall.
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Before departing for the weekend, we’re going to bump this blog post to the top of the feed. If you haven’t yet, please read it:
We’re big supporters of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria here at ONE, with so many of our members helping raise awareness about the great work it’s doing to save lives. Despite fantastic results — providing AIDS treatment for 3 million people, anti-TB treatment for 7.7 million people, and 160 million insecticide-treated bed nets for prevention of malaria – the Global Fund is under attack.
Columnist Mike Gerson has just written an excellent column on this issue that’s published in today’s Washington Post. We encourage you to read it, and share it widely!
We at ONE have been working hard to respond to this wave of negative coverage of the Fund, which is based almost entirely on one initial press report that took incidents in a few countries where funding was misappropriated – incidents caught and identified by the Fund itself! – and twisted them to imply that fraud was widespread. We blogged here on this, joining other allies in trying to get out the facts. It’s been tough, with so many being all too willing to believe the worst.
We’re also pleased to hear that the Global Fund announced today that it is taking some extra measures to increase its vigilance, including an external review of all of its financial safety systems. Those already in place are robust, but this might help assuage the donors. The Global Fund needs to deal with this problem to be sure, but its most important work is to speed resources to countries fighting three raging epidemics and the sooner it can get back to that the better.
