As Covid rages, world risks losing TB gains

PARIS: In the year since Covid-19 turned the world upside down, the diagnosis and treatment of another serious lung disease – tuberculosis – has plummeted, leaving experts concerned that progress in the fight against this pandemic are lost.

Tuberculosis is treatable and easily diagnosed, but until Covid-19 emerged it was the world’s biggest infectious killer, causing 1.4 million deaths each year and infecting more than 10 million people.

Although tuberculosis has affected humans for millennia, progress towards eradicating this preventable disease has been slow, with the vast majority of cases occurring in developing countries.

Ahead of World Tuberculosis Day on Wednesday, the Stop TB partnership warned that lockdowns and health interventions caused by Covid-19 have resulted in a 23% drop in treatment and diagnosis of tuberculosis.

It takes the world back 12 years in its fight to eradicate the global killer.

“Twelve years of impressive progress in the fight against tuberculosis, including reducing the number of people missing from tuberculosis care, has been tragically reversed by another virulent respiratory infection,” said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB partnership. tuberculosis.

“In the process, we are putting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people at risk.”

– Worse than feared –

At the onset of the pandemic, modeling from Johns Hopkins University showed that a three-month lockdown followed by a 10-month disruption of health services would result in 6.3 million more TB cases by 2025.

During the same period, 1.4 million people would die from the disease, according to the model.

Experts now recognize that the situation is much worse than that envisioned in the Johns Hopkins simulation.

Statistics from the nine countries with the highest incidence – Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, Tajikistan and Ukraine – show that the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis has already fallen by one million people in the world. total.

And new studies from India and South Africa show that people with tuberculosis are three times more likely to die if infected with Covid-19.

“The effects of Covid-19 go far beyond death and disease caused by the virus itself,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this week.

“The interruption of essential services for people with TB is just one tragic example of how the pandemic is disproportionately affecting some of the world’s poorest people, who were already at higher risk of contracting TB. .

Jose Luis Castro, president and CEO of the global health organization Vital Strategies, told AFP that the impact of Covid-19 on tuberculosis would be felt “for a long time”.

“Covid-19 has demonstrated how interconnected we are all,” he said.

“No one is safe until we are all safe. We can see our fragility and our vulnerability to a deadly virus that spreads very, very easily from person to person. This is news. experience for most people. “

– ‘Abyssal funding’ –

According to WHO figures, there are currently more than 75 candidate Covid-19 vaccine candidates on the market or under development.

This time last year, there was none.

The Stop TB partnership says that while there is a new TB vaccine in the works, at current funding levels, it will not go live until 2027 at the earliest.

By that time, millions more will be dead.

Castro said funding for a new tuberculosis vaccine currently stands at around $ 100 million, or one-tenth of what is allocated for HIV vaccine research.

“We will never develop a pipeline for effective tuberculosis vaccines with the current abysmal level of funding,” he said.

Thokozile Phiri Nkhoma, Stop TB Partnership board member and community representative, compared the global response to two distinct respiratory diseases.

“After less than a year, a vaccine has been developed and is now being deployed to help contain and hopefully end Covid-19,” she said.

“But although tuberculosis has been around since the days of the pharaohs, the only approved vaccine is 100 years old and not fully functioning. First-line treatment for tuberculosis has been around for decades and drug resistance is on the rise.

“The millions of people with TB who go undetected and untreated remain at risk of spreading the disease.”