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STORY: WHO / TB ADVANCER
TRT: 1.54
SOURCE: WHO
RESTRICTIONS: EMBARGOED UNTIL 09H00 GMT (10H00 LONDON)
23 OCTOBER 2013
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 21 OCTOBER 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND / FILE
FILE – RECENT, SOUTH AFRICA
1. Close up, vials
21 OCTOBER 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Mario Raviglione, Director of the WHO Stop TB Department:
“We have today, some 22 million lives that have been saved and some 56 million people that have been cured since 1995, so, this is major success of TB control efforts. At the same time, this is really, in 2013, no time for complacency.”
FILE – RECENT, SOUTH AFRICA
3. Med shot, doctor checking on patient
21 OCTOBER 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Mario Raviglione, Director of the WHO Stop TB Department:
“We are missing cases. The links in TB and within the TB chain are today still too weak, to the point that some patients that are diagnosed are not reported in the system and therefore we don’t know what’s happening to them, and some others may actually never be diagnosed. We have to close this gap. We are talking about three million people here.”
FILE – RECENT, SOUTH AFRICA
5. Med shot, doctor looking at x rays
21 OCTOBER 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Mario Raviglione, Director of the WHO Stop TB Department:
“What we are seeing today is the result of a couple of years of intensive efforts to provide countries with more rapid tests to detect multitrack resistant TB, but at the same time ehat we are seeing is that there is an increasing gap between those patients that are diagnosed and those that actually enter the treatment.”
FILE – RECENT, SOUTH AFRICA
7. Mead shot, nurse and patient
8. Close up, TB drugs
9. Various shots, technician conducting tests in lab
Tuberculosis (TB) treatment has saved the lives of more than 22 million people, according to the WHO Global tuberculosis report 2013 published today (22 October). The report also reveals that the number of people ill with TB fell in 2012 to 8.6 million, with global TB deaths also decreasing to 1.3 million.
Dr. Mario Raviglione, Director of the WHO Stop TB Department said that this was a “major success of TB control efforts” but at the same time, this was “no time for complacency.”
The report underlines the need for a quantum leap in TB care and control which can only be achieved if two major challenges are addressed.
The first challenge is that around three million people, equal to one in three people falling ill with TB, are currently being ‘missed’ by health systems.
Raviglione said “we are missing cases” as “the links in TB and within the TB chain are today still too weak, to the point that some patients that are diagnosed are not reported in the system and therefore we don’t know what’s happening to them, and some others may actually never be diagnosed.”
The second challenge relates the response to test and treat all those affected by multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), which is currently is inadequate.
Raviglione said what we are seeing today “is the result of a couple of years of intensive efforts to provide countries with more rapid tests to detect multidrug-resistant TB, but at the same time what we are seeing is that there is an increasing gap between those patients that are diagnosed and those that actually enter the treatment.”
Insufficient resources for TB are at the heart of both challenges. TB programmes do not have the capacity to find and care for people who are “hard-to-reach”, often outside the formal or state health system. Weak links in the TB chain (a chain that includes detection, treatment and care) lead to such people being missed.
The new data confirm that the world is on track to meet the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target of reversing TB incidence, along with the target of a 50 percent reduction in the mortality rate by 2015 (compared to 1990). A special Countdown to 2015 supplement to this year’s report provides full information on the progress to the international TB targets. It details if the world and countries with a high burden of TB are “on-track” or “off-track” and what can be done rapidly to accelerate impact as the 2015 deadline approaches.
On the second challenge, the problem is not only that the links in the MDR-TB chain are weak, but that the links are simply not there yet, the report suggests.
WHO estimates that 450 000 people fell ill with MDR-TB in 2012 alone. China, India and the Russian Federation have the highest burden of MDR-TB followed by 24 other countries.
While the number of people detected worldwide with rapid diagnostic tests increased by more than 40% to 94 000 in 2012, three out of four MDR TB cases still remain without a diagnosis.
Even more worrying, around 16 000 MDR-TB cases reported to WHO in 2012 were not put on treatment, with long waiting lists increasingly becoming a problem. Furthermore, many countries are not achieving high cure rates due to a lack of service capacity and human resource shortages.
