Daily Times

The world can eradicate tuberculosis by 2045 if the fight against the killer disease is properly funded, an international team of experts said Wednesday.

Warning of the immense economic and social costs of inaction, they said that better screening, treatments and public awareness were needed to reduce the more than 10 million cases recorded every year.

A chronic lung disease which is preventable and largely treatable if caught in time, tuberculosis is the top infectious killer of our time, causing over 1.6 million deaths each year.

“That is huge and the economic burden of that to both developing and developed nations is staggering,” Eric Goosby, the United Nations’ special envoy for the disease, told AFP.

“It’s not rocket science, it’s really common sense. We need to initiate a new prevention strategy.”

Tuberculosis has existed for millenia and is latent in around a quarter of the world’s population.

Despite killing nearly as many people each year as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, there has not been a new, commercially available tuberculosis vaccine in a century.

The disease currently receives only around 10 percent of the research funding allocated for AIDS.

A team of experts from 13 nations, writing in The Lancet, said that funding for research and development would need to quadruple to around $3 billion per year if the disease is to be properly tackled. In India alone, where one in three global tuberculosis deaths occur, providing better access to treatment and targeting at-risk communities for screening could cut deaths by nearly a third with an annually outlay of $290 million.

That compares to the $32 billion each year in economic losses — including treatment costs and lost productivity — attributed to tuberculosis.