Millions predicted to develop tuberculosis as result of the lockdowns
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The title is a bit misleading, it is not really about the risk to have millions of people developing Tuberculosis due to lockdown, but rather to the bizarre assignation of research resources. After all, one quarter of the world's population is thought to have latent infection with TB.
Dr Lucica Ditiu who is the Executive Secretary of the WHO Partnership, "Stop TB", says that for 100 years we have had only one Tuberculosis vaccine and we have only two or three potential vaccines in the pipeline.
So she says that TB scientists look with amazement at a disease which… is 120 days old and has 100 vaccine candidates in preparation. They think this world is really crazy.
She argues that not only we do not have a good vaccine against tuberculosis (in children, the vaccine decreases the risk of contracting the infection by only 20% and the risk of infection becoming an active disease by almost 60%), but we do not have a vaccine against HIV, and no vaccine against malaria, etc..
Expecting a correlation between media exposure and vaccine is completely silly, and using it in an argument even more. HIV has had much more exposure, probably trillions invested globally, and still no vaccine after 40 years of research.
So what about Covid-19 future vaccines? And the media exposure that get this kind of research?
If you get HIV there is also medication that turns it into a chronic infection but you can’t infect others and you will not get ill.
So no there’s no vaccine but they’re pretty close.
At that point usually it'll go dormant, and slowly eat up the macrophage, not multiplying very fast. This can last for years, even decennia. And then at some point it'll come out and start multiplying again, and after a year or so the host will be dead.
Between 1/4th and 1/3rd of humanity has a latent TB infection.
Lately TB has become more and more resistant, so the treatments are losing effectiveness (plus treatments only ever "win" by getting the disease back into the latent stage, which only works once for some reason). The vaccine has been losing effectiveness. It still works on kids, it generally does not make adults immune anymore. And even if you're vaccinated, that does not help against latent infection. With a latent infection, weaken the immune system and it'll spring to life ... and kill you (HIV being the big immune weakening culprit here, some Hep in Africa, or just plain cold or very hot weather). Even immune kids can get a latent infection and die from the disease decades later when there's some complication happening (like for instance COVID-19).
Under normal circumstances, TB kills between 1.5 and 2 million people worldwide, yearly. That's 2-3 TIMES more than covid will kill, except TB has done this every year, for at least 200 years (maybe more). TB has (slowly) killed a billion humans, minimum. Due to medical care being rationed everywhere TB is expected to kill 30-40% more this year.
If people stay locked down and a vaccine or cure is developed. If not, we could be looking at 50-120 million dead (7.7 billion people * 70-80% who'll need to catch the disease to provide herd immunity * 1-2% fatality rate). And that's assuming that in none of those 5.4-6.1 billion people infected a mutation emerges that makes a SARS-CoV-3 that is different enough to render the antibodies ineffective.
There's just a wee bit of urgency here too.
"SUMMARY
While stringent COVID-19 responses may only last months, they would have a lasting impact on TB in high-burden settings, through their effect mainly on TB diagnosis and treatment.
Globally, a 3-month lockdown and a protracted 10-month restoration could lead to an additional 6.3 million cases of TB between 2020 and 2025, and an additional 1.4 million TB deaths during this time.
As such, global TB incidence and deaths in 2021 would increase to levels last seen in between 2013 and 2016 respectively – implying a setback of at least 5 to 8 years in the fight against TB, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Long-term outcomes can be strongly influenced by the pace of short-term recovery.
Each month taken to return to normal TB services would incur, in India, an additional 40,685 deaths between 2020 and 2025; in Kenya, an additional 1,157 deaths; and in Ukraine, an additional 137 deaths over this period
To recover the gains made over last years through increased efforts and investments in TB, it is important to have supplementary measures and resources to reduce the accumulated pool of undetected people with TB. Such measures may include ramped-up active case-finding, alongside intensive community engagement and contact tracing to maintain awareness of the importance of recognizing and responding to symptoms suggestive of TB, using digital technology and other tools. Securing access to an uninterrupted supply of quality assured treatment and care for every single person with TB will be essential. Notifications will provide a helpful approach for monitoring the progress of such supplementary efforts."
COVID-19 kills in USA 3 times more people in a day with all mitigations in place than TB does in a year without any extraordinary effort on mitigation.
Statistics for USA [0]: > In 2017, the most recent data available, 515 deaths in the United States were attributed to TB. This is a decrease from 528 deaths attributed to TB in 2016.
So, let's be honest, we - I mean people like me, or you here on HN - don't care enough to really help these millions dieing out of our bubble... That's the truth. We may be outraged that nothing happens, but I will not change my job and invest my privilege to help this people. Will you?
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/statistics/tb...
Well, TB is endemic in the Vietnamese community.
Guess where two of the largest communities are? LA and SF Bay.
If you're observant, you can see public health nurses scurrying around town doing TB follow-up visits on them.