Ahead of World Tuberculosis Day (March 24), the World Health Organization said the targets set for 2022 “are at risk, mainly due to lack of funding”.
According to the WHO, global spending on TB screening, treatment and prevention in 2020 was half the global target of $13 billion a year.
“Urgent investments are needed to develop and expand access to the most innovative services and tools to prevent, detect and treat TB, which could save millions of lives every year, reduce inequalities and avert huge losses. economic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
“These investments offer huge returns on investment for countries and donors”, in particular by helping to reduce health care costs, he added.
In terms of research and development in the field of tuberculosis, the WHO estimates that the world should invest overall 1.1 billion dollars more.
The disruption of health services due to the Covid-19 pandemic has reversed years of global progress in the fight against tuberculosis, a disease caused by the tubercle bacillus that most commonly affects the lungs.
Deaths linked to this disease have thus started to rise again, for the first time in more than ten years, the WHO announced in mid-October.
From 2018 to 2020, 20 million people received TB treatment. This represents 50% of the five-year target set at 40 million people.
During this same period, 8.7 million people received preventive treatment against tuberculosis. This represents 29% of the target set at 30 million for 2018-2022.
The situation is even worse for children and adolescents.
In 2020, 63% of children and young adolescents under the age of 15 with TB remained off the radar of health systems or were not officially reported as having accessed testing and treatment services. The proportion was even higher – 72% – for children under 5 years old.
“Children and adolescents with TB lag behind adults in access to TB prevention and care,” said Dr Tereza Kaseva, Director of the Global TB Program at the WHO.