TUBERCULOSIS
A GLOBAL EMERGENCY!
Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease. Like the common cold, it spreads through the air. Only people who are sick with TB in their lungs are infectious. When infectious people cough, sneeze, talk or spit, they propel TB germs, known as bacilli, into the air. A person needs only to inhale a small number of these to be infected.
Left untreated, each person with active TB disease will infect on average between 10 and 15 people every year. But people infected with TB bacilli will not necessarily become sick with the disease. The immune system "walls off" the TB bacilli which, protected by a thick waxy coat, can lie dormant for years. When someone's immune system is weakened, the chances of becoming sick are greater.
TB is curable but kills 5000 people every day. 2 billion people, equal to a third of the world’s total population, are infected with TB bacilli, the microbes that cause TB. 1 in 10 people infected with TB bacilli will become sick with active TB. People with HIV are at even greater risk.
TB is a disease of poverty. Especially affects the most vulnerable such as the poorest and malnourished. Virtually all TB deaths are in the developing world affecting mostly young adults in their most productive years.
Multidrug-resistant TB
(MDR-TB) is diagnosed when the disease does not respond to the standard drug treatment. MDR-TB is present in virtually all 109 countries recently surveyed by WHO and partners(Click here to see WHO 2006 Fact Sheet)
(Click here to see WHO - Global TB Report 2005)
Globally one-fifth of new tuberculosis cases are from India.
India accounts for nearly one-fifth of the global burden of tuberculosis, and the disease is one of India’s most important public health problems.
Approximately 40% of Indians are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis.Every day, about 5000 people develop TB disease while over 1000 die of TB.
TB kills more adults than any other infectious disease, accounting for almost 400,000 deaths annually. It mainly afflicts people who are in the economically productive years of their lives (15–54 years), thereby causing huge social and economic disruption. This, in turn, hampers the development of the country.
An adult suffering from TB loses three to four months of working time, on an average. This translates to 20–30% of the household’s annual income — a crippling loss for families (that are already battling poverty and underdevelopment). The annual cost to the country has been pegged at US$ 300 million in direct costs and at US$ 3 billion in indirect costs.
TB kills more women in India than any other infectious disease, and this is more than the combined figure from all other causes of maternal mortality. It also adversely affects child-care. Children of infected mothers often drop out of school in order to supplement the family income and to help take care of siblings. A substantial proportion of female infertility is also caused by tuberculosis.
The stigma attached to TB adds to the burden of disease for both men and women, and even more so if they are of marriageable age. While men have to deal with the stigma at their work place and at the community level, women are faced with ostracism within the household and in the immediate neighbourhood.
Studies indicate that 100,000 women are rejected by their families each year on account of TB. Women are inhibited in discussing their illness and participating in social functions due to fear of becoming an outcast.
Unless urgent action is taken, more than 4,000,000 people in India will die of tuberculosis in the next decade.
India, with an estimated 5.1 million HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus) infected persons, has the second highest HIV-infected population in the world. Approximately two million Indians are estimated to be co-infected with TB and HIV.
HIV infection has a marked impact on the control of TB as the two diseases are closely linked. TB is the most common opportunistic disease that affects people infected with HIV. As HIV debilitates the immune system, vulnerability to TB is increased many fold. Without HIV, the lifetime risk of TB-infected people developing tuberculosis is only 10%, compared to over 50% in the case of people co-infected with HIV and TB. HIV is also the most powerful risk factor for the progression of TB-infection to the disease. In a reciprocal manner, TB accelerates the progression of HIV into AIDS, thus shortening the survival of patients with HIV infection.