Agence France Presse
Headline: WHO, World Bank launch accelerated fight against TB
Date: 23 October 2001
WASHINGTON, Oct 23 (AFP) - The world must spend another 4.5 billion dollars to fight a tuberculosis crisis, a coalition led by the World Health Organization and World Bank said here Tuesday.
About one-third of the world, or two billion people, is estimated to be infected with the TB bacillus, although only five to 10 percent, especially those with HIV/AIDS, get sick.
The WHO and the World Bank, leading a broad coalition knows as the Stop TB Partnership, launched a program new Global Plan to Stop TB to reverse rapid growth of the disease.
It would cost 9.3 billion dollars to implement the plan, the coalition said in a statement, adding that it faced a funding gap of about 4.5 billion dollars.
"With a death toll of nearly two million people last year alone, TB's deadly association with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and growing drug-resistance to TB, the Stop TB Partnership said that TB is an imminent public health emergency," the statement said.
Vulnerable and poor populations were especially at risk, it said, noting for example the refugees camps building up along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan during the US bombardments.
"Afghanistan and Pakistan are already dealing with high TB infection rates. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are living in cramped conditions along their common border," it said.
"In these circumstances there is a real risk that even more people will fall victim to the disease."
The new campaign calls for expanded access in affected countries to the World Bank anti-TB scheme, known as the "directly observed treatment, short-course" (DOTS).
The DOTS scheme calls for state sponsorship of a program to detect people with early TB symptoms, provide drugs, monitor treatment and report the results.
The symptoms of TB are a persistent cough, which is not responsive to antibiotics, fever and weight loss. It may occur outside of the lungs in lymph nodes, bones, kidneys and the central nervous system.
The medicines cost as little as 10 dollars for a complete treatment, which only reaches one out of four sick people.
The global campaign also includes prevention of multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), research and development of new TB drugs with a shortened treatment period and strategies to improve treatment of people with TB who are HIV positive, the statement said.
"Investing in accelerated DOTS expansion will have a profound impact -- 22 million people would be cured of TB and 16 million lives would be saved by 2005," said WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Twenty-two countries comprise almost 80 percent of the global TB burden.
They are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
Delegates at a Stop TB Partnership meeting here reaffirmed a global commitment made in 1998 to detect 70 percent of people with infectious TB cases and to cure 85 percent of those new cases by 2005.
djw/jlp
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