UNTREATED TB INFECTS 10-15 PEOPLE EVERY YEAR

New Delhi, 19 December 2006

NEW DELHI, December 20 (INFA): If tuberculosis (TB) is left untreated for long, it would infect 10 to 15 persons every year, but the infected people may not necessarily become sick, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) study.

The study has revealed that the immune system walls off the bacilli which, protected by a thick waxy coat, can lie dormant for years. But when the infected person’s immune system is weakened, the chances of becoming sick of TB are great.

TB is now a global public health menace of catastrophic proportions.  Like the common cold, it spreads through the air. Only people who are sick with TB in their lungs are infectious. When infectious people cough, sneeze, talk or spit, they propel TB germs, known as bacilli, into the air. A person needs only to inhale a small number of these to be infected.

According to the WHO, someone in the world is infected every second.  Overall, a third of the world’s population is currently infected with the bacillus and 5 to 10 per cent of these, if they are not also infected with HIV, become sick or infectious some time during their lives. People with both HIV and TB infection are much more likely to develop TB.

The largest number of new cases in 2004 occurred in South-East Asia, which accounted for 33 per cent of the global total. But the estimated incidence per capita in sub-Saharan Africa is nearly twice that of South-East Asia, at nearly 400 cases per 100,0000.

A tireless advocate for people infected with both tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia and the manager of the national TB control programme in India have won a prestigious new UN-backed health prize for their efforts to transform control of the debilitating but curable disease that kills some 5,000 people every day.

Winstone Zulu from Zambia and L.S. Chauhan from India became the first winners of the The Stop TB Partnership Kochon Prize, inaugurated this year by the Partnership, a network of more than 500 organizations whose Secretariat is housed at the World Health Organisation (WHO) headquarters in Geneva.

The Kochon Foundation was created in 1973 by the late Chong-Kun Lee, Chairman of the Chong Kun Dang Pharmaceutical Corp, one of the first TB drug manufacturers in the Republic of Korea.

Zulu himself was cured of tuberculosis, although all of his four brothers died of the disease. He is a co-founder of Kara-Kabwe Programmes for Kara Counselling, a provider of HIV/AIDS counselling in Zambia, and was Co-President of TBTV. Org, one of the first global organizations of people with TB and HIV/AIDS.

Chauhan is Deputy Director-General (Tuberculosis) and Programme Manager of the National TB Control Programme in India. Since 2002, he has overseen the rapid expansion of the DOTS TB-control Programme in India, a remarkable accomplishment in the country that bears the world’s highest TB burden.---INFA