Tuberculosis is now almost equal to HIV/AIDS as the leading cause of death by infectious diseases, according to the World Health Organization. WHO said that, in 2014, 1.1 million people died of tuberculosis worldwide, while HIV/AIDS killed 1.2 million people worldwide, including 400,000 who were infected with both HIV and tuberculosis.
The report includes information from 205 countries and territories about all aspects of tuberculosis (TB), including drug-resistant forms, as well as on research and development of treatments and financing. Six million new cases of TB were reported to the WHO in 2014, which is less than two-thirds of the estimated 9.6 million people worldwide who became sick with TB last year.
Among the estimated 480,000 cases of multi-drug resistant TB in 2014, which is a strain of the disease that resists the two most potent anti-TB drugs, only one in four was diagnosed.
The one bright side of this serious news is that it reflects the dramatic gains in access to and success with treatments for HIV/AIDS. Many people now survive with their HIV infection as a chronic disease. But the numbers also reflect disparities in funding for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB), Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO TB program, told Reuters Health.
There are funding disparities between the two diseases, according to WHO. HIV/AIDS gets 10 times as much funding as does TB, with $8 billion spent on HIV/AIDS interventions, compared with a total of $800,000 spent on TB.
Part of that disparity is because HIV/AIDS largely affects countries in Africa that are poor in resources, whereas TB is more prevalent in countries such as India and China, which are better able to finance their own efforts to address TB infections. Even so, there remains a $1.4 billion gap in the amount of funding needed for TB interventions in 2015.