Urgent action and funding are needed to sustain progress in the global fight against tuberculosis (TB), the UN World Health Organization (WHO) has said, warning that global targets for prevention and treatment "will likely be missed". According to the UN health agency, though TB cases fell by 9 percent and deaths by 14 percent between 2015 and 2019, access to TB services remains a challenge. "Equitable access to quality and timely diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and care remains a challenge", Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, said in a news release announcing the findings. "Accelerated action is urgently needed worldwide if we are to meet our targets by 2022," he urged. Caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis and most often affecting the lungs, TB spreads through the air when people with the disease cough, sneeze or spit. In spite of being a curable disease, many people die from TB and it is a leading cause of death of people living with HIV. Approximately 90 percent of those who fall sick with the disease each year live in just 30 countries. Most people who develop the disease are adults, and there are more cases among men than women In 2019, approximately 1.4 million people died from TB-related illnesses, and of the estimated 10 million people who developed the disease that year, some 3 million were not diagnosed or were not officially reported to national authorities, according to WHO. The situation is even more acute for people with drug-resistant TB. About 465,000 people were newly diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in 2019 and, of these, over 60 percent were not able to access treatment. There has also been limited progress in scaling up access to treatment to prevent TB, said WHO, adding that funding is a major challenge. In 2020, funding for TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care reached $6.5 billion, about half of the $13 billion targets agreed by world leaders in 2018. In addition, disruptions in services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to further setbacks, said the UN health agency. In many countries, human, financial, and other resources have been reallocated from TB to the COVID-19 response, while data collection and reporting systems have also been impacted. — UN news
