$2.5B Required to Fight Lethal New TB Strain -- Why U.S. Should Kick In

With only 49 cases of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis documented in the United States between 1993 and 2006, why should the U.S. commit millions or billions of dollars to the global fight against this emerging disease?

I posed that question to Mario Raviglione, director of the World Health Organization's Stop TB program, after yesterday's release of the WHO's global survey of tuberculosis drug resistance.

So-called XDR-TB is a new and more lethal form of multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR-TB. Old-fashioned tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people yearly; the rise of drug-resistant varieties has global health experts warning of imminent disaster, and the WHO is about $2.5 billion short of what it needs to control the disease.

Providing that money would not be difficult for the United States and other wealthy countries -- and according to Raviglione, doing so wouldn't simply meet an altruistic obligation, but make self-interested sense.

Even a couple cases a year costs the U.S. system tremendously. It costs several hundred thousand dollars to treat a case; they might need to have surgery, and the cost of drugs is tremendously high, as is the cost of following that person to make sure they're taking the drugs.
Even a few casses a year is a very costly excercise. The best thing is to prevent MDR-TB and XDR-TB.

The thing to remember is that we're dealing with a literally airborne global disease. It's something you can't foresee coming and going. It's a global disease, and with the movement of people in and out of countries, you can never guarantee anything. If you want to be free of
TB, you have to look at it from a global perspective. It's not sufficient to say that it's controlled in one country -- and besides, it's not even controlled here. You still have XDR-TB in the United
States.

Image: National Library of Medicine*

See Also:

• World Health Organization Accidentally Created Killer TB Strain
• Missing Disaster by a Breath
• Antipsychotic Medicine Inspires Tuberculosis Drug
• WHO: Stop Drug-Resistant TB Before It's Too Late

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