The Press Trust of India
Headline: Global coalition to fight tuberculosis
Dateline: 24 October 2001
BODY:
Warning the international community of the rapid spread of tuberculosis -- including in
India -- a new Global Plan to Stop TB, led by the World Health Organisation and the World
Bank, was launched to reverse the alarming rate of growth of the disease.
"With a toll of nearly two million people last year alone, TB's deadly association with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and growing drug-resistance to TB, TB is an imminent public health emergency," the broad coalition, called the Stop TB Partnership said in a statement Tuesday.
The coalition said that the world must spend another 4.5 billion dollars to fight a tuberculosis crisis. Pointing out that the implementation of the plan would cost 9.3 billion dollars, the statement said that the coalition faced a funding gap of about 4.5 billion dollars.
WHO Director General Gro Harlem Bruntland, World Bank officials and international financier and philantropist George Soros among others appealed at a press conference here to governments in both developed and developing worlds to substantially increase their financial backing for it.
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.
Vulnerable and poor populations were especially at risk, the statement said, noting for instance the refugees camps building up along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan during the US bombardments.
The new drive proposes the expanded access in affected countries to the World Bank anti-TB scheme, known as the "directly observed treatment, short-course" (DOTS).
The DOTS is an internationally accepted strategy through which healthcare workers and community volunteers treat people suffering from TB with a combination of medicines, in ways that ensure the success of their lengthy treatment.
The medicines cost as little as $10 for complete treatment, which only reaches one out of four sick people.
"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.
A global commitment made in 1998 to detect 70 percent of people with infectious TB cases and to cure 85 per cent of those new cases by 2005 was reaffirmed here by the delegates at a Stop TB Partnership meeting.
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