1.4 million more people are expected to die of TB as cases go undiagnosed and untreated during lockdown. This will set back global efforts to end TB by five to eight years. TB kills 1.5 million people a year, more than any other infectious disease. There is currently no TB vaccine for adults, only one for children. Up to 6.3 million more people are predicted to develop TB between now and 2025
“The fact that we’ve rolled back to 2013 figures and we have so many people dying, this for me is sickening,” said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership. “I am outraged that just by not being able to control what we do … and forgetting about programmes that exist we lose so much, starting with the loss of the lives of people.”
“I have to say we look from the TB community in a sort of puzzled way because TB has been around for thousands of years,” Ditiu said. “For 100 years we have had a vaccine and we have two or three potential vaccines in the pipeline. We need around half a billion people to get the vaccine by 2027 and we look in amazement on a disease [COVID-19] that is 120 days old and it has 100 vaccine candidates in the pipeline. So I think this world, sorry for my French, is really fucked up,” she said. “The fear we have in the community is that researchers are heading towards just developing a vaccine for Covid. That’s on the agenda of everyone now and very few remain focused on the others diseases. We don’t have a vaccine for TB, we don’t have a vaccine for HIV, we don’t have a vaccine for malaria and out of all this, TB is the oldest. So why this reaction? I think because we are a world of idiots. What can I say?”
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