[ad_1]
March 24 is World Tuberculosis Day. The United Kingdom urges governments to put an end to this global pandemic.
Tuberculosis is preventable and curable, but remains one of the top 10 causes of death in the world.
Gerald Tan, CGTN, looks at some questionable statistics.
According to the World Health Organization, tuberculosis is the deadliest killer in infectious diseases. Every day, 4,500 people die from tuberculosis. It's a global record of about 135,000 each month.
The latest WHO statistics show that tuberculosis killed 1.6 million people in 2017. And what is more and more alarming, more than a third of recent victims of tuberculosis have been infected with a resistant strain antibiotics.
Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said, "Frankly, we should all be more worried about multidrug-resistant TB than we are. He does not receive anything like the level of attention that he should be doing. To put things in context, Ebola has a mortality rate of about 50%. Multidrug-resistant TB has a mortality rate of about 50%. "
In 2017, there were an estimated 10 million new TB cases worldwide. Two-thirds were concentrated in only eight countries – all located in Asia and Africa. Ventilation:
But here's another sobering thought: Because TB often affects the poorest members of society, researchers believe that one-third of cases are neither diagnosed nor treated.
As Sands explains, "the Global Fund aims to end the AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria epidemics by 2030. However, the truth is that we are not on the road to this. ambition. If you compare the trajectory in terms of new infections and deaths to what we need to do, we need to step up the fight. "
And to intensify this fight, the UK says it needs about ten and a half billion dollars. This excludes funding for research and development – all necessary to develop new tools to end the scourge of tuberculosis.
Mike Reid on the global fight against tuberculosis
CGTN's Wang Guan spoke with Mike Reid to learn more about global efforts to fight TB. Reid is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
Related
[ad_2]
Source link
