The World Health Organization said in a report released that because of the record breaking tuberculosis infections diagnosis, it has earned a spot together with HIV/AIDS as a leading cause of death from infectious diseases. It was found that in 2014, 1.1 million people died of TB. HIV/AIDS killed 1.2 million people globally in the same year, including 400,000 who were infected with both HIV and TB.
Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the TB program in WHO said the report reflects the startling gains in access to HIV/AIDS treatment in the past years, which helped many people, survive their infections. However, it also shows inequality in funding for the two global killers.
According to Fox news, Raviglione said in an interview that the good thing about TB intervention is it has already saved approximately 43 million lives since 2000, but even if most TB cases can be successfully treated, the death rate remained "displeasingly high. The report features data from 205 countries and territories on all forms of TB, including drug-resistant forms, research and development, and financing.
It discovered that 6 million new cases of TB were reported to the World Health Organization in 2014, it is relatively less than two-thirds of the estimated 9.6 million people worldwide to have fallen sick with TB in the previous years. Difference in funding was a key issue, Raviglione said, pointing out that international funding for HIV/AIDS is 10 times higher than that of TB, with $8 billion spent on HIV/AIDS treatment, compared to a total of $800,000 allotted for TB.
Part of the reason for the disparity is that HIV/AIDS mostly affects resource-poor countries in Africa, while TB is commonly diagnosed in countries such as India and China, which are able to finance their own domestic efforts to address TB infections better.
Even if that is the case, there is still a $1.4 billion gap in the amount of funding needed for TB interventions in 2015. Raviglione said it is time to start funding TB at a position that can make even more of a difference in repressing global deaths.
