Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is contagious and airborne, spread by infected people that cough or sneeze. It usually affects the lungs, but may also affect the brain, kidneys and other parts of the body. TB remains a formidable Global Health challenge particularly considering the fact that about 1.7 billion people, 23% of the world’s population, are estimated to have a latent TB infection, and are thus at risk of developing active TB disease during their lifetime, as currently estimated by World Health Organization (2018).

An estimated 10 million people fell ill with TB and 1.5 million died in 2018, 5.7 million men, 3.2 million women, 1.1 million children and 860 thousand were people living with HIV. In 2020, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the first year-on-year increase (of 5.6%) of TB deaths since 2005 and the total number of TB deaths returned to the level of 2017 with 1.7 million deaths. This number is forecasted to further increase in 2021 and 2022. TB remains one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide and the leading cause from a single infectious agent (above HIV/AIDS, not including COVID).

Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) remains a public health crisis and a health security threat. WHO estimates that there were 484’000 new cases with resistance to rifampicin (RR-TB) – the most effective first-line drug, of which 78% had MDR-TB. Worldwide, only 56% of MDR-TB patients are currently successfully treated.  In the modern world of global travel, and ease with which infections spread, it is very worrying to note that three countries accounted for almost half of the world’s cases of MDR/RR-TB in 2018: India (27%), China (14%) and the Russian Federation (9%)
Track the global TB drug pipeline