Drug firms should not forget about tackling TB
- With vaccines being rapidly rolled out to counter Covid-19, tuberculosis continues to kill around 2 million people a year yet the pharmaceutical industry shows only limited interest
A world longing to get back to business is obviously focused on the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines. But as damaging to lives and economies as the pandemic is, there are other diseases that wreak as devastating a death toll annually that we must not lose sight of.
There is no overall protection against what scientists call the “big three”, malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/Aids, which each year kill an estimated 2.7 million people. The extraordinary disruption to health care systems caused by the coronavirus risks dramatically raising the number of deaths from these diseases unless there is greater global financial and political will.
TB is the deadliest of the three, claiming up to 2 million lives a year, a similar number to that so far recorded for Covid-19. The disease is estimated to have killed at least 1 billion people in the past 200 years, more than any other infection.
But despite being so deadly, there is only one licensed vaccine, a treatment commonly known as BCG that is a century old this year and is effective only in infants. No effective immunisation exists to protect adolescents or adults.
The problem is that BCG stops working over time, a lesson to those putting their faith in a Covid-19 vaccine providing long-term protection; uncertainties abound with a disease that is new and mutating. But TB has been largely eradicated from developed countries.