To achieve the 2030 target of reducing the incidence of Tuberculosis (TB) to as low as 20 per 100,000, global investment worth $242 billion would be required for diagnosis, treatments and prevention over the next eight years.
Suvanand Sahu, the deputy executive, Stop TB Partnership, an advocacy group on Thursday said tuberculosis programmes have been chronically underfunded, with limited access to screening through modern equipment for instance.
He said significant progress would have been achieved in the control of TB if the disease enjoyed the level of investment in research and development of vaccine put in COVID-19 and huge resources invested to prevent air-borne spread.
“We call on all partners to work towards increasing the resources available for TB. Not making the funds available will be more expensive and air-borne disease with drug-resistant variants can go out of control and pose global health security risk,” Sahu said, speaking at a virtual talk show convened by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to mark World TB Day 2022.
According to WHO, global spending on TB diagnostics, treatments and prevention in 2020 were less than half of the global target of $13 billion annually by 2022.
An extra $1.1 billion is required yearly for research and development, Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general said in a statement calling for urgent investments to develop and expand access to the most innovative services and tools to prevent, detect and treat the disease. This is expected to save millions of lives each year, narrow inequities and avert huge economic losses.
“These investments offer huge returns for countries and donors, in averted health care costs and increased productivity,” Ghebreyesus.
The health body also touched on the need to build, on lessons learnt from COVID-19 research as TB required investment and action to accelerate the development of new tools, especially new TB vaccines.
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It said progress towards reaching the 2022 targets set in the United Nations high level meeting political declaration and the WHO Director-General’s Flagship Initiative is said to be at risk mainly due to lack of funding.
Between 2018 and 2020, 20 million people were reached with TB treatment, marking 50 percent of the five-year target of 40 million people reached with TB treatment during the period. In the same period, 8.7 million people were provided TB preventive treatment, 29 percent of the target of 30 million for 2018-2022.
The situation is even worse for children and adolescents with TB. In 2020, an estimated 63 percent of children and young adolescents below 15 years with TB were not reached with or not officially reported to have accessed life-saving TB diagnosis and treatment services, with the proportion even higher for children under 5. Almost two-thirds of eligible children under 5 did not receive TB preventive treatment and therefore remain at risk of illness.
COVID-19 has had a further negative and disproportionate impact on children and adolescents with TB or at risk, with increased TB transmission in the household, lower care-seeking and access to health services.
WHO urged countries to urgently restore access to TB services, disrupted due to COVID-19 pandemic for all people with TB, especially children and adolescents.
“Children and adolescents with TB are lagging behind adults in access to TB prevention and care,” said Tereza Kasaeva, director of WHO’s Global TB Programme. “The WHO guidelines issued today are a game-changer for children and adolescents, helping them get diagnosed and access care sooner, leading to better outcomes and cutting the transmission. The priority now is to rapidly expand implementation of the guidance across countries to save young lives and avert suffering.”
