COVID-19 lockdown risks 1.4 mil extra TB deaths: study
12 May, 2020
The global lockdown caused by COVID-19 risks a "devastating" surge in tuberculosis cases, with practically 1.4 million additional deaths from the world's biggest infectious killer by 2025, new research shows.
TB, a bacterial infection that normally attacks patients' lungs, is largely treatable but still infects around 10 million people every year.
In 2018, it killed around 1.5 million people, according to the World Health Organization, including a lot more than 200,000 children.
Since effective medication exists, the world's TB response is devoted to testing and treating as much patients as possible.
But as COVID-19 forces governments to put populations on lockdown, new disease models showed that social distancing could bring about a disastrous rebound in TB infections -- the effects which are set to persist for a long time.
For the reason that social distancing can make it impossible for healthcare workers to test vulnerable populations and for patients to access ongoing treatments.
"Regardless of having drugs and treatment... we aren't yet near ending it and TB remains the largest infectious disease killer," said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership.
"COVID has hit us very hard. The more people we have not diagnosed and treated the more problems we will have in the coming years."
Models developed in partnership with epidemiologists at Imperial College London used TB response data from three high-incidence countries: India, Kenya and Ukraine.
They showed a two-month global lockdown and an instant recovery in response programs could result in a lot more than 1.8 additional TB infections globally over another five years, and a predicted 340,000 deaths.
But if countries neglect to quickly reimplement their testing and treatment, the models showed things would get much worse.
For instance, a three-month lockdown accompanied by a 10-month "recovery" period could lead to yet another six million infections and 1.4 million TB deaths by 2025.
"TB is really curable with affordable drugs. So a whole lot of control efforts in recent decades have really been focused in diagnosing cases as fast as possible," said Nimalan Arinaminpathy, associate professor in mathematical epidemiology at Imperial.
"Lockdowns and other measures against coronavirus are affecting these systems for managing tuberculosis. Actually (in the models) it requires several years because of this elevated TB burden to drop to pre-lockdown levels."
The research didn't look at the comorbidity between TB, an acute lung infection that leaves even survivors' lungs compromised, and COVID-19, a viral infection that often leads to lung problems.
Cheri Vincent, head of TB division at USAID, said several studies were looking at how TB puts a person at higher risk of getting sick with COVID-19.
"As that information becomes available we may be looking at a more dire situation," she said.
Suvunand Sahu, deputy executive director of Stop TB Partnership, said there was significant concern over the millions of men and women coping with the infection as COVID-19 spreads.
"We realize that TB does create damage in the lungs, so whenever your lung capacity is limited adverse outcomes of COVID would naturally be likely to be higher," he said.
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