As countries across the world grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN Health agency reminded everyone on Tuesday, World Tuberculosis Day 2020, that TB remains the world’s most deadly infectious disease.
Tens of millions of people have been saved from the deadly tuberculosis disease since 2000 but the “battle is only half-won”, UN health experts said ahead of World TB Day.
A new approach to combating tuberculosis, or TB, has been announced by UN health experts, who say the mobile phone and the internet are potential key tools in the fight against the killer disease.
The inhabitants of developing nations will find out whether they have been infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in two days, not the standard two to three months, thanks to two new United Nations-backed initiatives.
Italian author and journalist Anna Cataldi, a former United Nations Messenger of Peace, was today appointed as an Ambassador of the Stop TB Partnership to raise awareness worldwide about the unfair burden of tuberculosis on refugees, migrants, people living in poverty and other disadvantaged groups.
A tireless advocate for people infected with both tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia and the manager of the national TB control programme in India today won a prestigious new United Nations-backed health prize for their efforts to transform control of the debilitating but curable disease that kills some 5,000 people every day.
With most of the estimated 9 million people who develop active tuberculosis every year still not receiving laboratory-confirmed diagnoses, the United Nations health agency today called for industry investment in new diagnostic tools targeted to low and middle income countries, where most cases occur.
Seeking to prevent the possible airborne transmission of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases from passenger to passenger on board aircraft, the United Nations health agency today issued updated guidelines to further minimize the risk, stipulating the postponement of long-distance travel by people with infectious TB.
Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV pose a deadly combination for millions of people in Africa, but a coordinated assault on both diseases can save up to 500,000 lives a year on the continent, experts gathered in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa said today, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
China – one the world’s largest countries affected by tuberculosis – has seen a 30 per cent drop in the occurrence of the disease since the introduction of a new control strategy in the last decade, putting it on track to meet the worldwide goal of cutting in half the incidences of the illness by 2015, the United Nations health agency said today.
