An aggressive treatment method has cured some 36 million people from tuberculosis (TB) over the past 15 years and averted up to 8 million deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday in its 2009 Global Tuberculosis Control Report Update.
In the past 12 months alone, 2,3 million people were cured – the highest annual number ever for infectious patients.
The report adds, however, that millions of people still do not have access to high quality TB care. The disease is second only to HIV/AIDS in how many people it kills each year. About 1,8 million died of tuberculosis in 2008.
WHO also warned that the current pace of progress was “far from sufficient” to meet the target of eliminating the contagious (smitsomme) disease. Drug resistant strains of the TB bacteria are infecting 500.000 people a year, but only 6.000 were receiving treatment according to WHO standards in 2008.
WHO Stop TB Director Mario Raviglione pointed to a 2 billion US dollar dollar shortfall in funding and warned many more could miss out on the needed treatment.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
