A UN High-Level Meeting May See Hopes to End Tuberculosis

Bobby John is a New Delhi based physician and global health advocate. By Bobby John, MDNEW DELHI, Sep 28 2018 (IPS)In the early months of 1993, there was frenetic activity within the Geneva headquartered WHO’s Communicable Diseases program, to get Tuberculosis designated as a Global Emergency. While countries like India had instituted TB Control programs as early as 1962, and Tanzania in the late 1970’s had shown field level evidence of programmatic innovations like directly observed treatment would reduce TB related mortality, the global reality was things were not going too well as far as reducing incidence and mortality for this age-old disease.Frighteningly, for the western world at least, the disease had made a dramatic comeback, showing up in a drug resistant avatar in New York between 1991-92.Fast forward 25 years – it is 2018: Tagged the world largest TB burden country, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has committed to India eliminating TB by 2025; and at last, TB had a special UN High Level Meeting on September 27th.India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Delhi End TB Summit, March 13, 2018The intervening 25 years since the declaration of the “Global TB Emergency” has seen robust growth of national TB control programs. The WHO expanded the list of 22 high burden countries of the late 1990s to include many more countries and three different categories of burden.India, Indonesia, and Nigeria remain hosts to a large proportion of the global TB burd...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Featured Global Headlines Health Population Poverty & SDGs TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news