I personally get “number fatigue” when I look at too many large numbers–it’s a professional hazard. But the numbers associated with Tuberculosis (TB) made me sit up in my chair. Shocking facts: one-third of the world’s population, or 2 billion people, are infected with the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis (TB). This translates into more than 9 million new TB cases each year and 1.7 million deaths annually.
TB is a highly communicable disease – a person who leaves TB untreated can infect between 10-15 people. But not everyone infected with TB gets sick, and the disease itself is highly treatable. As we’ve discussed earlier this week with waterborne diseases, it is those most vulnerable that are at highest risk – this includes children, the elderly, and people living with HIV. Moreover, TB is hard to detect early and especially difficult to detect amongst HIV patients, who often don’t exhibit the symptoms commonly used to identify TB. (Check out how large African ‘hero rats’ are being trained to smell TB for early detection.) The scariest recent trend is the high incidence of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).
Strangely, despite numbers that easily trump HIV/AIDS stats, TB seems to receive pretty dismal attention and even more dismal funding. My extremely unscientific attempt to prove this was to “Google test” the terms – “HIV/AIDS” got 22.4 million results, “Tuberculosis” just 12.4 million. Some estimates even show that TB funding is a mere 5% of HIV/AIDS funding. However, my sense is that the tide is turning, and oddly enough, it is success in HIV/AIDS that is possibly driving this change. As people living with HIV live longer, their exposure to diseases such as TB requires greater, and more integrated, attention. So our HIV/AIDS funding dollars could be doing double-duty.
Case in point: during its creation, the Global Fund‘s mandate (and name) was expanded to include Tuberculosis and Malaria, presumably because of worldwide recognition that these diseases were disproportionately affecting similar regions of the world. Today marks the opening day of the Global Fund replenishment meeting – let’s see where the money goes.