The war on tuberculosis is getting new weapons for the first time in decades, offering hope for controlling the deadly disease but major funding shortfalls threaten progress, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday.
“We are at a crossroads between the elimination of TB within our lifetime, possibly, and millions of avoidable deaths in the next several years,” Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO Stop TB Department, said at a press conference in Washington as the WHO released its annual report.
The choice, said Kenneth Castro, of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, at the same press conference, is to “pay now, or pay more later”.
The WHO has pledged to cut TB deaths to half the 1990 rate, a goal the agency said in its new report it was on track to achieve in most regions. The number of new cases per capita had also fallen – down 2.2 per cent last year from the year before.
Nevertheless, tuberculosis remains one of the world’s top killers: last year, there were some 8.7 million new cases around the world, causing 1.4 million deaths, according to the new report.
And the epidemic of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis remains a monumental challenge, Raviglione said.