Covid-19 got global attention as it affected rich nations, says TB expert

 

The sudden focus on Covid-19 has had a significant negative impact on TB because in many countries the Covid-19 response has been built on or has utilised the TB response, says Grania Brigden.

India, with 2.4 million tuberculosis (TB) cases in 2019, has the most cases (27%) in the world. With attention focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, resources from government TB programmes around the world, including in India, have been diverted to the COVID-19 response, says Grania Brigden, director of The Union, a global organisation working on TB and other lung-related issues.

“I fear we can expect the number of “missing millions” in TB increasing again after all the work that has been done to find the missing cases of TB,” Brigden says. She is referring to the millions of undiagnosed and untreated cases of TB in India and other countries.

Brigden, who has previously worked with the United Kingdom’s National Health Services as a respiratory doctor and with Médecins Sans Frontières on antimicrobial resistance, spoke to IndiaSpend on how COVID-19 has impacted TB, what countries need to do to prevent and control TB, and why the focus on eliminating TB should not waver.

Edited excerpts:

According to this year’s Global TB Report, TB is still the “top infectious disease killer in the world”, in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic. As many as 10 million people developed TB in 2019 and it killed 1.4 million. Why then, in all these years of working on the issue, have we never seen the kind of mobilisation for TB that we see for COVID-19?

In the past five years especially, we have seen far greater mobilisation and commitment to ending tuberculosis at all levels, with the ministerial summit in Moscow and the UN High Level meeting on TB in 2018. The global response to COVID-19, especially the race for a vaccine, probably has at least something to do with the fact that the novel coronavirus is impacting the wealthy developed world heavily. Neither SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome], MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or Ebola really touched people's lives in the west the way that COVID-19 has. This reality mirrors just why TB continues to be seen like the ‘poorer cousin’ among infectious diseases--it only affects poorer people in the developing world. Despite killing more people than any other infectious disease, outside of the high burden LMIC [low- and middle-income] countries, it remains out of sight and out of mind.