Tuberculosis remains to be a deadly disease, based on the new press release from the World Health Organization on Wednesday, Oct 28. In fact, the number of TB deaths is almost equal to that of HIV/AIDS, making it one of the world's leading killers.
Based on the newly released report, at least a million people died from TB, a bacterial infection, in 2014, of which 140,000 were children and 480,000 were women. More than 800,000 of them were males. Around the same period, around 1.2 million were killed due to HIV/AIDS. About 400,000 of them were diagnosed with both TB and HIV.
Based on these figures, TB kills 4,400 people each day, a figure that the WHO director for TB program Dr Mario Raviglione finds unacceptable, especially since effective interventions including medications are now available. Furthermore, diagnosis of the disease continues to become more reliable and accurate.
The total number of reported deaths is also much higher today than in the previous years, but WHO attributes the increase to the improved data collection and studies on disease spread. The organization believes that one of the challenges of fighting the infection is the detection and treatment gap. At least 37% of the population infected with TB in 2014 might have been undiagnosed or left unreported to the national authorities. More patients are also contracting drug-resistant TB, which is more aggressive and harder to treat. Globally, the cure rate for this type of TB is only 50%.
There's also a funding gap between HIV and TB, in which amount allotted for HIV is around 10 times more than that of TB. However, the WHO believes the disparity may be rooted on where the disease is more prevalent. TB is more common in countries that may have the funds to support their own interventions while HIV is still widespread in African countries were resources are limited and the population are poor.
Nevertheless, the existing interventions against TB have helped save more than 40 million people in 15 years since 2000. Overall, the death rate fell by almost 20%.