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GENEVA / GLOBAL TB REPORT
STORY: GENEVA / GLOBAL TB REPORT
TRT: 1.34
SOURCE: WHO
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH /NATS
DATELINE: 20 OCTOBER 2014, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
RECENT
1. Wide shot, exterior of WHO headquarters
20 OCTOBER 2014, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
2. Med shot, Raviglione leafing through report
3. Close up, Raviglione and report
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr Mario Raviglione, Director Global TB programme WHO:
“There has been a significant progress in the fight against tuberculosis with a 45% decline in death rate compare to 1990. As a result 37 million lives have been saved starting in 2000 and until 2013. Nevertheless tuberculosis remains the number two biggest killer in the world after HIV-AIDS.”
5. Close up, pages of report
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr Mario Raviglione, Director Global TB programme WHO:
“The public crisis caused by multi drug resistant tuberculosis continued through 2013 with some 480 000 new multi-drug resistant tuberculosis cases estimated to have emerged in that year.”
7. Close up, report
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr Mario Raviglione, Director Global TB programme WHO:
“A first time trend analysis of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, thanks to new data that we have available allows us to say that the percentage of multi-drug resistant TB among all new cases has remained unchanged at 3.5 %. However there are some parts of the world especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, central Asia etc… that are experiencing much higher levels that reach 35 to 40%.”
9. Med shot, Raviglione and report
The World Health Organization’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2014, published today, shows that 9 million people developed TB in 2013, and 1.5 million died FROM, including 360 000 people who were HIV positive.
The report revealed that there are almost half a million more cases of the disease than previously estimated.
However, it also underlined that the mortality rate from TB is still falling and has dropped by 45% since 1990, while the number of people developing the disease is declining by an average 1.5% a year. An estimated 37 million lives have been saved through effective diagnosis and treatment of TB since 2000.
Dr Mario Raviglione, Director of the Global TB Programme of WHO stressed that tuberculosis remains second biggest killer in the world after HIV-AIDS.
Dr Raviglione said also that “proper action against tuberculosis requires mobilization of some 8 billion US$ every year of which 2 billion are at the moment the estimated gap.”
These revised figures fall within the upper limit of previous WHO estimates.
The report, however, underlined that a staggering number of lives are being lost to a curable disease and confirms that TB is the second biggest killer disease from a single infectious agent. In addition, around three million people who fall ill from TB are still being ‘missed’ by health systems each year either because they are not diagnosed, or because they are diagnosed but not reported.
The multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) crisis continues, with an estimated 480 000 new cases in 2013. Worldwide, about 3.5% of all people who developed TB in 2013 had this form of the disease, which is much harder to treat and has significantly poorer cure rates.
While the estimated percentage of new TB cases that have MDR-TB globally remains unchanged, there are severe epidemics in some regions, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
In many settings around the world, the treatment success rate is alarmingly low. Furthermore, extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), which is even more expensive and difficult to treat than MDR-TB, has now been reported in 100 countries.
Since 2009, with more laboratories rolling out rapid tests, there has been a tripling of MDR-TB cases being diagnosed. In 2013, 136 000 MDR-TB cases were detected and 97 000 people were started on treatment. Although the number of patients treated has increased three-fold since 2009, at least 39 000 patients, diagnosed with this form of TB, were not being treated last year and globally only 48% of patients were cured.
A special supplement to this year’s WHO report marks 20 years of anti-TB drug-resistance surveillance. It outlines the MDR-TB response to-date and the priority actions that must now be taken from prevention to cure. Anti-TB drug-resistance surveillance has been a pathfinder in global efforts against antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Another key challenge is the co-epidemic of TB and HIV. An estimated 1.1 million (13%) of the 9 million people who developed TB in 2013 were HIV-positive, with four out of five cases and deaths occurring in the African Region. While the number of TB deaths among HIV-positive people has been falling for almost a decade, from 540 000 in 2004 to 360 000 in 2013, antiretroviral treatment, preventive therapy and other key interventions still need to be further scaled-up.
Research has a crucial role to play in ending the global TB epidemic and efforts to develop new tools to combat the disease have intensified during the past decade.
The research and development pipeline has produced several new diagnostics (such as Xpert MTB/RIF) and two new drugs to treat MDR-TB (bedaquiline and delamanid). Additional rapid tests, new drugs and drug regimens, and vaccines are in clinical trials.
However, TB research and development is still severely underfunded.
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