Diabetes seen as next driver of TB epidemic

BARCELONA – In the next decades, diabetes is seen as the major driver of the epidemic on tuberculosis (TB), a disease that killed 1.5 million people around the world last year, international health experts said.

According to Jane Carter, president of the Paris-based International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union), the next challenge in combatting TB is the rising cases of diabetes globally.

“In the last decade and a half, (efforts were) actually focused on HIV driving the TB epidemic… But there are other immune-suppressive illnesses that make TB infection move to TB disease more rapidly. You’re going to hear about diabetes,” Carter said during the National Press Foundation’s Journalist 2 Journalist Lung Health Media Training here on Monday.

Carter noted that HIV infection increases the risk of developing TB disease by 10 percent, while diabetes increases the risk by about 30 percent “over lifetime.”

The increasing numbers of obesity and diabetes in India and China, the world’s two largest nations, are “what is going to drive the next TB epidemic” in the coming years.

The United States also has problems with obesity and diabetes, but it does not have the background of TB infection.

In a presentation, STOP TB Partnership executive secretary Lucica Ditiu reported that some 1.5  millon people died of the lung disease in 2013. This is equal to the population of Lyon, France.

It is estimated that nine million people get sick with TB every year. In South Africa alone, some 60,000 people die of TB every year.

“We still have a problem of tuberculosis despite having this disease for 2,000 years. We are still having it and we are still unable to get rid of it in our shame… The vaccine is a hundred years old, but it does not even work,” Ditiu said.

Citing World Health Organization (WHO) data, Ditiu said not much has changed in the global trend of TB over the past years and this is a “very disappointing situation.”

She noted that TB is curable and affordable to cure, so it “is really a big shame for humanity to be in a situation in which we still have to die because of TB.”

To terminate TB by 2035, the world is aiming for 10 cases per 100,000 population, from the current rate of 125 per 100,000.

But since the decline in cases is at a slow rate of two percent per year, it will take 180 years to meet the target.

Ditiu said if the world would not accelerate actions against TB and think of a different way now, efforts would only become irrelevant.

Based on WHO records, more than 95 percent of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. The disease is one of the top five causes of death for women and children aged 15 to 44. In 2013, around 550,000 children contracted TB and 80,000 of them died.