Madrid, 23 mar ( EFE).-today the panorama of tuberculosis in the world is “much worse” which when discovered its cause in the 1980s and they predicted that it would be eradicated by the year 2000, today warned a medical Spanish expert in this disease.
Before the commemoration tomorrow of the World day of Tuberculosis, Dr. Pere Joan Cardona, head of the unit of Experimental Tuberculosis of the Hospital Germans TrÃas i Pujol Badalona, in the region of Catalonia, cited three risk factors.
Is the AIDS, that multiplies the susceptible population develop the pathology; Multiresistant strains and the accumulation of the world’s population in the cities, which favors transmission.
“Unfortunately, prophylactic and therapeutic arsenal is virtually the same as in the 1980s,” said Cardona, one of the discoverers of the first vaccine against latent TB infection
The expert pointed out that the increase of mobility on a global scale has caused that tuberculosis no longer be a problem in the third world to become “a usual disease in large European cities such as London, Paris or Barcelona”.
This fact, continued, must promote “their visibility and increase in resources” to achieve its eradication.
Although the number of cases has fallen globally since 2006, the number of children who have lost their parents due to tuberculosis reaches 10 million.
Is also important to note that 13 per cent of the cases of these deaths occur in people who are also infected with the HIV virus, sometimes hindering his treatment, he said.
Countries like the India and China are in the lead in terms of the number of declared cases, with 40%, followed by the African continent, which represents 24%.
These figures are “especially alarming” if one takes into account that between them every time there is more Multiresistant strains, which are adapted to survive medications and move easily between individuals.
The organization not governmental doctors without borders has alerted, at this date, the “alarming advance” of MDR tuberculosis medicines.
According to the last data collected in several of its projects, the global reach of the most deadly of the variants of this ailment is much larger than estimated so far, and if action is not taken immediately, coordinated and joint, “could become very soon a huge crisis of global health”.
In 2010 9.5 million new cases of TB were detected and it was the cause of 1.7 million deaths around the world. EFE
