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Governments around the world will meet on Wednesday to discuss the continuing scourge of tuberculosis, which last year claimed more lives than any other communicable disease.
About 1.3 million people worldwide have died of TB in 2017. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 300,000 people living with HIV and TB have died last year .
Tuberculosis, formerly called "consumption" because of the way in which patients seem to be lost, has been known for centuries. The bacterium responsible for tuberculosis was discovered 136 years ago and the development of an effective antibiotic allowed rich countries to largely contain the disease after World War II.
Yet, the US health agency estimates that about 10 million people worldwide are infected with TB each year, mostly in poor countries where access to health care is limited.
"It's really a global epidemic," said Dr. Tereza Kasaeva, who heads the WHO's TB program.
Speaking before a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the United States General Assembly, Kasaeva said that the goal of eradicating TB in the world of the present 2030 was "very ambitious, because progress is too slow."
Like HIV, TB remains a highly stigmatized disease, preventing some people from seeking treatment.
Experts are particularly concerned about the growing number of people contracting variants of drug-resistant TB, many of whom are not diagnosed correctly. Their treatment can be expensive and arduous, requiring years of medication with strong side effects.
Dr. Ralf Otto-Knapp of the German Central Committee for Tuberculosis, a group created in the late 19th century when the disease was still prevalent in much of Europe, warned against complacency in era of world travel.
"Because of the growing mobility of society, it is also affecting economically more powerful countries," he said. "We need a common political will and resources to fight TB effectively."
Kasaeva said she hoped executives attending the New York meeting on Wednesday would commit to bridging the growing gap between the amount of money available and the additional billions of dollars needed to fight against the disease.
Activists applauded the recent decision of the World Health Organization to recommend a change in the treatment of drug-resistant TB, giving priority to oral medications rather than injectable drugs.
The Médecins Sans Frontières group said that such treatment could reduce debilitating side effects, improve cure rates and reduce the number of deaths, but that the US pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, maker of the leading drug, bedaquiline , needed to reduce his price. – and middle-income countries with high rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis.
The company has already dramatically cut drug costs in some countries, but in others, a six-month treatment can cost many thousands of dollars, much more than most people can afford.
Companies have been reluctant to invest in the development of TB drugs – with only two new drugs on the market in the last 50 years.
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