Epidemiology

We are suffering from a worldwide epidemic of tuberculosis (TB) in which more than 2 billion people are estimated to be infected with the disease causing pathogen. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that over 9 million new cases of TB are reported each year with 2 million deaths. Statistics indicate that TB cases are on the rise globally even though regions such as South East Asia and the Western Pacific are on the decline. It seems that the overall increase is mainly due to Eastern Europe and African regions where the incident rate can reach as high as 365 per 100,000 of the population per year. Evidently, economic decline, poor TB control and lack of sufficient health care have all been held accountable for this rapid surge in TB cases. Furthermore, regions with the highest incidence positively correlate with high incidence of HIV/AIDS.

The WHO have set new targets to increase efficiency of detection and treatment for TB, however, still only 80% of the cases were treated and only 45% of the cases were detected. A "Stop TB Strategy" was created with the fundamental vision of creating a world free from TB by 2050. In addition, a more recent aim is to reduce TB prevalence and death rate by 50% by 2015 relative to that of 1990. The past success of the DOTS programme, helping to treat of 20 million patients, will be expanded to include more cases as well as more research to control the problem of increasing MDR-TB variations of the disease. 

"Global Incidence Rates" Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under creative commons license: Original image