BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, January 7 (IPS) – Global efforts to end tuberculosis (TB) will be in vain without the dedicated investment in research into this debilitating disease that kills 4,000 people every day, Organization Stop TB Partners warned.
Lucica Ditiu, CEO of Stop TB partnership, told IPS in an interview from Geneva.
She added: “We don’t have Bill Gates to support TB research, but TB remains a worrisome disease with mortality rising for the first time in more than a decade.
Tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that mainly affects the lungs, has been around for more than millennia and remains one of the leading killers globally. But it is preventable and curable with the right investment in diagnosis and treatment.
Ditiu attributes the increase in TB incidents to a number of factors; Many people diagnosed with and receiving treatment for TB have defaulted on their loans due to disruptions to health services following the COVID-19 pandemic and global shutdown. Furthermore, many people remain undiagnosed because they have not been reached.
“South Africa has done a great job for Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa as well as Rwanda in trying to disrupt as little as possible the treatment and diagnosis of people with TB,” said Ditiu. She commends media awareness programs and community door-to-door campaigns to promote diagnosis and treatment.
Countries need to invest more in finding people with TB and getting them into treatment. Until you find people, you can’t get them to be treated, and this is where we’re falling a lot behind,” she said.
Ditiu fears the worst if the world doesn’t change current trends in TB transmission. An estimated 5.8 million people will be treated for TB in 2020; down 21% from 2019 and more than 4 million people around the world still go untreated. According to the Stop TB Partnership, half of those who do not receive treatment are likely to die from the disease.
Acknowledging that funding for TB is always inadequate, Ditiu says TB is the poor brother of those with big pockets for HIV and AIDS.
“Overall, we only have 30% of the funding we need globally available. We have places that have done well to prevent TB for people living with HIV. TB control among people living with HIV is going well, especially in African countries because HIV has resources. ”
According to the Partnership to Prevent Tuberculosis, an international network of organizations established in 1998 to help end TB as a public health problem, research and development (R&D) funding on tuberculosis has remained unchanged since 2018.
Total global funding for tuberculosis (TB) research will reach US$915 million by 2020 – less than half of the US$2 billion target set by participating governments at the Summit. 2018 United Nations High on Tuberculosis.
In 2021, TB has a funding gap of US$13 billion globally, with only US$5.3 billion available to its programs. It has suffered a funding reduction of up to US$500,000 in 2020 as many countries have taken money from TB to respond to COVID-19.
A new report, Funding Trends in Tuberculosis Research, 2005–2020 by the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and the TB Prevention Partnership, shows that TB receives less than 1% of the investment. into COVID-19 Research and Development during the first 11 months of the pandemic.
“The raising of more than $100 billion for COVID-19 research and development in the first 11 months of the pandemic shows us how powerful a concerted effort against the epidemic can be.” Ditiu noted.
While the pandemic has proven that effective vaccines can save lives, the world is still working on a 100-year-old vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin or BCG. However, a more effective vaccine may have a higher effectiveness rate, especially for adults. Why is it taking so long to develop a new, more effective TB vaccine when the health burden from TB is increasing?
“This is the movie,” Ditiu commented. “We have a vaccine for a hundred years that we know for the last 40 years doesn’t work (effective) except for newborn babies, and we haven’t done much about it yet.”
While research on a new vaccine is slow because of poor funding, Ditiu said several potential vaccines are in the works and are expected to be available by 2027.
“It takes a long time to get a vaccine. But because of COVID (we’ve realized), it’s possible to have a vaccine much faster, and we hope to use what we’ve learned from COVID-19 to get a TB vaccine,” Ditiu told IPS.
Tuberculosis vaccine research has been slowed by chronic lack of funding with only one TB vaccine of the century being moderately effective, compared with more than 20 COVID-19 vaccines.
“It has helped develop dozens of COVID-19 vaccines within a short span of time,” said Austin Aurinze Obiefuna, Executive Director of the Afro Global Health Alliance and incoming Vice President of the TB Prevention Partnership Council. less than a year is basically money.
“I think the same huge funding should be applied to the development of a TB vaccine. But that simply doesn’t seem to happen.”
According to the Partnership to Stop Tuberculosis, making the necessary progress against TB requires investments that are aligned with the worldwide threat of the disease. This includes a commitment to remedy past funding shortages. Over the next two years, US$10 billion is needed to close the funding gap for TB research and development.
Mark Harrington, CEO of LABEL, an independent activist and policy and community-based research group.
“COVID-19 has made more people around the world aware of the importance of R&D spending than ever before. Now is the time to finally start making investments that are ambitious enough to end TB for good.”
By @IPSNewsUNBureau
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