NAIROBI, March 18 (Xinhua) -- Progress towards eliminating tuberculosis suffered a major setback in the past year amid disruption in surveillance, diagnosis and case management linked to COVID-19 pandemic, experts said on Thursday.
The international health experts, who spoke at a virtual briefing in Nairobi ahead of World TB Day to be marked on March 24, said the pandemic had reversed gains made in the fight against the bacterial disease.
"Twelve years of impressive gains in the fight against TB, including in reducing the number of people who were missing from TB care, have been tragically reversed by another virulent respiratory infection," said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of Stop TB Partnership.
Ditiu said the pandemic was to blame for nearly 23 percent decline in TB diagnosis and treatment in nine high-burden countries that accounts for 60 percent of the global burden of the highly contagious disease.
Ditiu said that high-burden countries should scale up TB prevention and control measures concurrently with COVID-19 to avert deaths and a strain on public health facilities.
"I hope that in 2021 we buckle up and we smartly address, at the same time, TB and COVID-19 as two airborne diseases with similar symptoms," said Ditiu.
Data from India and South Africa indicate that mortality rates among COVID-19 patients co-infected with TB tripled hence making a strong case for contact tracing, quarantine and prompt treatment.
Tereza Kasaeva, Director of Global TB Program at World Health Organization (WHO), said that high-burden countries should leverage on robust financing, innovation and political goodwill to boost response to the disease amid pandemic-related disruptions.
"We need to learn from innovation and collaborative efforts that were employed in responding to COVID-19 and apply the same lessons to scale up diagnosis and care of TB," said Kasaeva.
Peter Sands, executive director, Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria said that COVID-19 provides an opportunity to reinvent national programs aimed at containing the spread of TB and other infectious diseases.
"There is a need to seize the moment and reset the way we respond to TB across all spectrum of care and diagnosis based on the expertise gained while responding to COVID-19," said Sands.
A study conducted by Stop TB partnership in May 2020 found that a three-month lockdown followed by a 10-month restoration could lead to an additional 6.3 million TB cases between 2020 to 2025 and an additional 1.4 million fatalities during the same period.
The study projects that global TB infections and deaths in 2021 would increase to levels last witnessed between 2013 and 2016, implying an estimated setback of five to eight years amid the pandemic. Enditem
