Ban calls for boost in efforts to combat drug-resistant tuberculosis

25 March, 2013 - The United Nations chief on Sunday urged countries to strengthen their efforts to respond to drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis (TB) and increase funding to eliminate the deadly disease. In his message marking World Tuberculosis Day, March 24, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that while there has been much progress since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared TB a global health emergency two decades ago, there are still challenges to be met, mainly stopping the spread of multi-drug resistant TB, also known as MDR-TB, which threatens to reverse the gains achieved in past years. The theme of this year’s World Tuberculosis Day was, "Stop TB in my lifetime Call for a world free of TB". In his message Ban noted that “New diagnostics, new drugs and the promise of new vaccines have the potential to further accelerate progress against TB, which still kills 1.4 million people a year – more than any infectious disease other than AIDS. But two obstacles stand in the way.” “The first,” he said, “is the emergence of TB strains that fail to respond to first-line drugs […]; the second is the need for funding.” According to WHO, an estimated 8.7 million people developed TB and 1.4 million died from the disease in 2011. Worldwide, an estimated 630,000 people are infected with MDR-TB, which is notoriously difficult to diagnose and costs at least 10 times more to treat than drug-sensitive TB. “Low- and middle-income countries are already footing two-thirds of the bill for TB care and control,” Ban said, adding, “ They rely on the international community to provide the remaining third.”
Tuberculosis usually affects the lungs but can also cause adverse effects on the other parts of the body. TB is contagious in nature and can spread through air, when a person already affected with the disease sneezes, or otherwise transmit respiratory fluids through the air in some other ways. The major symptoms of tuberculosis includes chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. Moreover, the treatment of TB is quite difficult as it requires administration of multiple antibiotics over a long period of time. And hence, it is becomes very important to spread proper knowledge and awareness about the disease in large scale in order to eliminate the epidemic related with tuberculosis. India alone accounts for 20 percent of world's tuberculosis cases including 3 million sufferers every year and over 300 thousand death each year. (Source: UN)