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.
The appeal comes ahead of the first-ever WHO Global Ministerial Conference on Ending TB to be held in Moscow.
TB remains the worldÂs 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 (MDRÂTB) were started on treatment. Of those people, just over half were cured.
According to a survey in the third edition of ÂOut of StepÂ, a joint report by MSF and the Stop TB Partnership that reviews TB policies and practices in 29 countriesÂwhich account for nearly three-quarters of the global TB burdenÂ40 percent of people with TB remain undiagnosed. 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 todayÂs standard regimens, which cure just half of people with MDR-TB and only 28% of people with the even more deadly extensively drug-resistant (XDR-TB). Seventy-nine percent of countries surveyed include the newer drug bedaquiline in their national guidelines, and 62% include delamanid, but globally, less than five percent of people who could have benefitted had access to these drugs in 2016.
This week, MSF and the Stop TB partnership released the report ÂOut 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% each year. Among the countries surveyed, 75% 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.
ÂDespite 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. ÂThe 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.Â
At the Global Ministerial Conference this week, Mariam Avanesova, who was treated for MDR-TB in Armenia in 2010-2012 and represents TB people, the Eurasian network of people with TB experience, will hand over a petition to WHOÂs Director-General, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus. The petition is an urgent call for health ministers in key TB-affected countries to get their TB policies and practices in line with international standards, as defined by WHO including testing and treatment of TB and its drug-resistant forms. Initiated by MSF and the Stop TB partnership, the petition has been signed by more than 30,000 people from around the world united with people affected by TB.