The Gates Foundation today launched a $33 million initiative to partner with the Chinese government to combat tuberculosis. From the Seattle Times:
The new program aims to show that with better diagnosis, streamlined treatment regimens and improved patient monitoring, China can control a disease that currently afflicts 4.5 million of its people and kills more than 200,000 a year.
Effective treatment of ordinary tuberculosis is also the key to slowing the evolution of drug-resistant strains, including multidrug-resistant, or MDR, TB, Gates said.
“The alarming threat of drug-resistant TB is rising because of gaps and mistakes in the way we treat TB,” he said. “If we improve basic TB prevention and control, we will cut off MDR-TB at the source.”
China has the world’s second-highest number of TB infections, after India, and accounts for about a quarter of the world’s drug-resistant cases. Worldwide, about 2 million people die from TB every year.
An AP article reporting on remarks made by the head of the World Health Organization at a conference in Beijing on TB gives more details about drug-resistant strains of the disease:
“Call it what you may — a time-bomb or a powder keg,” Chan said at the opening of a three-day meeting on drug-resistant TB in Beijing. “Any way you look at it, this is a potentially explosive situation.”
TB is caused by germs that spread when a person with active TB coughs, sneezes or speaks. It’s ancient and treatable but now has evolved into stronger forms: multidrug-resistant TB, which does not respond to two top drugs, and extensively drug-resistant TB, which is virtually untreatable.
Left unchecked, people with drug-resistant TB could potentially spread the disease to others, creating an epidemic in the highly mobile global economy. Even when detected, the infected have to switch to more potent and expensive medicines, posing a problem for many countries with underfunded health care systems.
Of the more than 9 million people around the world who contract tuberculosis every year, about 500,000 get multi-drug resistant TB.
