Reuters.uk, UK
March 23 2005
Africa Lags in Fight Against TB, WHO Report Says
Thu Mar 24, 2005 12:05 AM GMT
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA (Reuters) – Tuberculosis has reached “alarming proportions” in
Africa, where co-infection with the widespread HIV virus makes a lethal
combination, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Thursday.
The number of cases of tuberculosis is rising 3 to 4 percent annually
across the African continent, though the respiratory disease is
being stemmed elsewhere, the United Nations agency said in a report,
“Global Tuberculosis Control.”
There were an estimated 8.8 million new cases worldwide in 2003,
according to the WHO report issued on World TB Day — 2.3 million of
them in Africa.
“The rate of TB infections has tripled in some African countries since
1990 … In Africa we have to face the fact that we have much further
to go,” WHO Director-General Lee Jong-wook told a news conference
in London.
Most of the victims of TB, a curable disease spread by coughing and
sneezing, live in developing countries, and an estimated 1.7 million
people died from the disease in 2003.
Nearly one-third of the deaths were in Africa where HIV/AIDS is
prevalent and health services are weak. TB and HIV form a deadly
combination and TB is the leading cause of death among people who
are HIV positive.
Globally, TB prevalence has dropped by more than 20 percent since
1990, and is “falling or stable” in five of the world’s six regions,
according to the WHO. “But for the strongly adverse trends in Africa,
prevalence and death rates would be falling more quickly worldwide,”
it said.
ASIA ON TRACK
India and China, with their vast populations, accounted for an
estimated 1.8 million and 1.3 million new TB cases, respectively,
in 2003 for a combined 35 percent of the global total, according to
the report.
But there has been “tremendous improvement” in the two densely
populated Asian powers, where more and more people are receiving
treatment, Lee said. Indonesia and Philippines are also making
progress.
Mario Raviglione, head of the WHO’s Stop TB Programme, attributed
the success in Asia to the right mix of government commitment and
financial support from the state and donor nations.
Nine of the 22 countries hardest hit by TB are in Africa, including
Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya.
The U.N. Millennium Development goal is to detect 70 percent of all
new infectious cases of TB by the end of 2005, and to cure or treat
successfully 85 percent of them.
A great effort is required to achieve this in Africa and eastern
Europe, where there are high levels of multidrug-resistant TB, the
deadliest form, the report said. The latest data show the WHO is
three percent short of the targets.
Several independent humanitarian organizations issued their own
statements to mark World TB Day.
The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said
inmates of overcrowded prisons in the southern Caucasus countries
of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are especially vulnerable to
the disease.
Paris-based Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) called
for the development of a simple, rapid test for TB in poor countries,
where health workers still rely on sputum microscopy.
This method, developed 123 years ago, detects TB in only about half
of those who have it, and is even less reliable for people with both
HIV and TB, the group said in a statement.
(Additional reporting by Patricia Reaney in London)
From: Baghdasarian