During the pandemic, the number of deaths from tuberculosis went up, reversing years of decline.
Between 2019 and 2021, the number of deaths from tuberculosis is expected to have gone up, reversing years of decline. The COVID-19 pandemic severely slowed down efforts to fight the disease, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was harder to fight deadly diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The health crisis has made it harder for countries to fight TB and meet their goals for stopping the spread of the disease.
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WHO told the world to use what we learned from the pandemic to fight tuberculosis, which is a big problem in places like India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we can beat big health problems if we work together, are determined, try new things, and use tools fairly.”
WHO’s annual TB report says that tuberculosis will kill 1.6 million people in 2021. This is more than the 1.5 million people who are expected to die from it in 2020 and the 1.4 million who will die from it in 2019. Between 2005 and 2019, the number of people who died from tuberculosis went down.
The report also warns that in the near future, TB could take the place of COVID-19 as the infectious agent that kills the most people around the world.
A recent report from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria shows that even though treatment and prevention efforts reached more people last year, the world is still not on track to beat these diseases that kill people.
The WHO report says that about 10.6 million people had tuberculosis in 2021, which is 4.5% more than in 2020.
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In its “End TB Strategy,” the WHO wanted to cut the number of TB deaths by 35% from 2015 to 2020. However, between 2015 and 2021, the number of TB deaths only went down by 5.9%.
