Governments given deadline to increase testing and treatment for TB

16 Novembre 2017

Geneva, Switzerland, November 16 (Infosplusgabon) -  Ahead of the first-ever Global Ministerial Conference on ‘Ending TB’ in Moscow, international medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Stop TB Partnership have called for countries with high burdens of tuberculosis (TB) to implement the latest international treatment and testing standards by World TB Day, 24 March 2018.

In a statement, MSF noted that TB remains the world’s top infectious disease killer, with 1.7 million deaths in 2016.

According to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) Global TB report, progress in diagnosing and treating all forms of TB is stalling in most countries. More than 4.1 million people with TB remained undiagnosed or unreported in 2016, and only one in five people with multidrug-resistant (MDR–TB) was started on treatment. Of those people, just over half were cured.

“Why do we continue to remain out of step when it comes to testing people for TB, when it’s the critical first step to treating this curable disease and preventing its spread?” said Dr Francis Varaine, TB Medical Advisor at MSF.

“Governments urgently need to step up, to stop people from needlessly dying of TB.”

According to a survey in the third edition of "Out of Step," a joint report by MSF and the Stop TB Partnership that reviews TB policies and practices in 29 countries – which account for nearly three-quarters of the global TB burden – 40 per cent of people with TB remain undiagnosed.

MSF said only seven of the countries have made Xpert MTB/RIF, a rapid molecular test, widely available for diagnosing TB. Newer medicines and regimens for treating drug-resistant (DR-TB) have demonstrated better outcomes than today’s standard regimens, which cure just half of people with MDR-TB and only 28 per cent of people with the even more deadly extensively drug-resistant (XDR-TB).

Seventy-nine per cent of countries surveyed include the newer drug bedaquiline in their national guidelines, and 62 per cent include delamanid**. Yet globally in 2016, these drugs were made available to less than five per cent of people who could have benefitted from them.

The statement said this week, MSF and the Stop TB partnership released the report "Out of Step" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA), presenting the results of an eight-country survey of national TB policies and practices. An epidemic of DR-TB is on the rise in Eastern Europe, where nearly half of all TB cases are MDR and the number of people with DR-TB is increasing by more than 20 per cent each year, it said.

Among the countries surveyed, 75 per cent have adopted a policy to use rapid molecular testing instead of older, slower testing methods, yet only half of those countries are actually using the test widely. An estimated 46,000 people with DR-TB in the EECA region went undiagnosed in 2015.

“Despite its deadly toll, most countries lag behind in implementing the existing and new tools that are available to tackle TB,” said Lucica Ditiu, Executive Director of the Stop TB Partnership.

“The WHO Global Ministerial Conference is the first step for concrete, bold and measurable commitments by ministers of health towards a strong accountability framework for heads of state and governments during the UN High Level meeting on TB.”

FIN/INFOSPLUSGABON/EST/ GABON 2017

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