Broken Promises

Following our previous blog upon the problem of TB , SOYMB reads that the UK is accused of "covering up" the G8's failure to cut the death toll from tuberculosis in south Asia. The G8 meeting in Okinawa in 2000 pledged to "Reduce TB deaths and prevalence of the disease by 50% by 2010". Three experts based at Dhaka Community Hospital in Bangladesh say the UK's strategy against the disease is aimed at preventing its spread to the west, rather than tackling the living conditions in deprived communities where TB is endemic. They say the commitment was watered down. The Millennium Development Goals, formulated by the United Nations in September the same year, put tuberculosis in a category with other infectious diseases and committed to "have halted and begun to reverse the spread" of all of them by 2015‚ "five years later than the target the G8 named".

The Department for International Development's (DfID) factsheet on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, issued in December 2008, claims that in southern Asia, "progress in halting and reversing the spread of tuberculosis" is "almost met, or on target". It describes mortality as moderate.

"It is now 2010, the deadline for the G8 millennial commitment. The latest WHO report (2009) suggests that the G8 target of reducing tuberculosis deaths by 50% has resulted in only an 11% reduction‚ "neither 'almost met' nor 'on target'," they say. "The Crown's term 'moderate mortality' covers up an annual tuberculosis death toll, estimated by WHO, of almost half a million people (460,003), mostly poor, in south Asia,"

The efforts of the UK focused on drug treatment. Currey and his colleagues say that insufficient attention has been paid to the poor housing, sanitation and nutrition that underlie TB. Tackling the "immuno-compromising stresses of poverty, migration, poor living conditions, decent employment and food security" are not part of the MDG goal against TB. The DfID's treatment-focused aim is not so much to reduce the incidence as to stop the spread of TB.

"Poor men and women, and particularly children who are dying of poverty-induced tuberculosis and other opportunistic diseases of poverty, or couples who are infertile because of reproductive tuberculosis but not potentially contagious, are all occluded [closed off] from the Crown's health strategy and from the interpretation of the MDG tuberculosis target," they explain .