World TB Day 2002 - In the News

The Moscow Times
Headline: TB Sees First Drop in 10 Years
Date: March 25, 2002
Byline: Robin Munro

The rate of new cases of tuberculosis fell in 2001 for the first time in a decade, giving hope that efforts to curb the epidemic are starting to take effect, health officials said Friday. Wieslaw Jakubowiak, coordinator of the World Health Organization TB control program in Russia, said Health Ministry statistics showed the rate has dropped some 3 percent from about 90 new cases per 100,000 people in 2000.

"This is the first sign that there is cause for some optimism," he said. About 342,000 TB cases were reported last year, including 133,000 new ones, while about 30,000 people a year, or 80 people a day, die of the disease, according to the Health Ministry statistics. The number of cases has more than doubled in the last decade.

"The number of new TB cases is no longer increasing, but the figures are still high," said Mikko Vienonen, special representative of the WHO director-general in Russia.

Other health experts said the statistics are difficult to interpret; for example, an increase in the number of cases could reflect greater detection activity rather than an underlying increase.

The experts were speaking at a news conference in the run-up to World Tuberculosis Day on Sunday. It was the 120th anniversary of the discovery of the TB bacillus by Robert Koch in Berlin and the 20th anniversary of the first World TB Day.

The disease has killed about 200 million people since 1882 and today kills 2 million people a year.

"Eighty percent to 85 percent of the problem is due to social factors," said Mikhail Perelman, the chief TB specialist at the Health Ministry. "To eradicate TB we need to be able to have high-quality lives." Vitaly Litvinov, director of Moscow City's scientific and clinical TB control center, said the capital had only about 45 new cases per 100,000 people in 2001, or half the national average rate of new infections. Unemployed people, vagrants and migrants are prominent among the new cases of TB, he said.

Mikhail Perelman praised President Vladimir Putin for taking up the cause of tuberculosis and pushing for greater efforts to combat the disease. Extra money flowing into treatment and prevention programs has meant that drugs are widely available and much more detection equipment has been installed in hospitals, he said.

Russia has hiked spending on fighting TB by about 15 times in four years - from 58 million rubles in 1998 to 900 million rubles in 2001, Vienonen said. This year's budget of 1.3 billion rubles ($ 42 million) includes another hefty increase, he said The Health Ministry is preparing a five-year strategy in conjunction with the Justice Ministry and leading institutes, he said.

Samantha Perkins, coordinator of British NGO Merlin's programs in Russia, which has in a TB program in the Tomsk region, said drugs to treat TB can be inexpensive. It costs about $ 15 to $ 20 to complete a six- to eight-month course of treatment, but if it is a multi-drug resistant, or MDR, case it costs about $ 4,000 for a 24-month course, she said.

Penal reform -- meant to jail fewer people in already crowded prisons where there are dual epidemics of TB and HIV -- could also improve the nation's health, Perkins said. "By fighting TB you can stop poverty and by fighting poverty you can stop TB," she said.

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