# Tuberculosis in Asia



## waltky (Oct 30, 2015)

Lil' Kim squanders money on missiles while his malnourished people die of TB...

*WHO: 5,000 North Koreans die annually from tuberculosis*
_Oct. 29, 2015 - Total deaths due to tuberculosis in North Korea have declined by 1,700 since 2013, but the disease still persists with 110,000 current TB patients._


> North Korea's tuberculosis deaths are declining, but 5,000 North Koreans still die from the disease annually.  The data from the World Health Organization was included in a report that indicated TB has surpassed the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, as the leading cause of global death.  Voice of America reported 20 out of 100,000 North Koreans die of TB, or at a rate that is 5-10 times that of neighboring countries: In South Korea, 3.8 out of 100,000 succumb to TB, the death rate is 2.8 per 100,000 in China, and the rate in the region is lowest in Japan, where it stands at 1.8 per 100,000.
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## Unkotare (Nov 4, 2015)

The people in North Korea are dying from _North Korea_. Cure that disease and they'll recover quickly enough.


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## waltky (Mar 23, 2016)

TB free by 2030...

*WHO: Tuberculosis Can Be Ended by 2030*
_ March 22, 2016 — In advance of World TB day (March 24), the World Health Organization is calling for collective global action and more money to support TB control strategies to end this scourge by 2030._


> The World Health Organization says ending tuberculosis by 2030, the target set by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals will be a challenge, but it can be done. It notes 43 million peoples’ lives have been saved since 2000.  WHO says countries can save the lives of the 1.5 million people who continue to die from tuberculosis every year by strengthening TB programs and adopting newer tools.  Director of WHO’s Global TB Program, Mario Raviglione, says several of the 30 countries with the highest TB burden are implementing newer TB strategies with some success. One such country is India, home to more people ill with TB and multidrug-resistant TB than any other country in the world.  He says the country is making progress in providing universal access to TB care for patients.
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> South Africa is another country that has expanded access to a rapid molecular test for TB and drug-resistant TB.  “South Africa is, let us remember, home to the largest number of people living with HIV who are receiving also TB preventive treatment. So, worldwide there are these sort of pathfinders for prophylaxis of tuberculosis, which is one of the other new elements of the new strategy that we are very much insisting on because it prevents tuberculosis and saves lives," said Raviglione.  WHO cites Thailand, Russia, Brazil, and Vietnam for running successful TB control programs. The multinational health group UNITAID is working with the WHO by investing in effective approaches to end TB. For example, it is scaling up better TB treatment for children.
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## waltky (Mar 24, 2016)

DR-TB adds to India's tuberculosis menace...

*Drug resistance adds to India's tuberculosis menace*
_23 Mar.`16 - After three years of battling tuberculosis, a disease that claimed the lives of his father and younger brother, Sonu Verma, a patient in northern India, hopes a cure for his illness may be within reach._


> "Only a few more months and my nightmare will end... it will be my rebirth, free from tuberculosis," the 25-year-old scrap dealer, who has been left visibly lean and weak by the disease, told AFP.  As India marks World TB Day on Thursday, it faces an estimated 2.2 million new cases of the disease a year, more than any other country, according to the World Health Organisation.  The government says it is stepping up its fight, with Health Minister J.P. Nadda earlier this week launching a new drug to help beat the growing menace of drug-resistant tuberculosis.  Treating TB successfully requires patients to follow a strict, months-long drugs regimen -- or risk their disease becoming drug-resistant.
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## waltky (May 23, 2016)

New TB initiative spots latent carriers...




*New Initiative Spotlights TB Prevention in Latent Carriers*
_ May 23, 2016 — UNITAID, a global health initiative, is taking the old adage “prevention is better than cure” to heart. To that end, it has just launched a new multi-million dollar initiative to finance new treatments that can prevent the onset of full-blown tuberculosis in hundreds of millions of people globally living with latent TB._


> Executive Director Lelio Marmora told VOA his organization is prepared to spend between $40 and $80 million on innovative proposals that could provide simpler, shorter and cheaper treatments for people who are at high risk of developing tuberculosis.  “What we aspire [to] is to have a large menu of projects to see how these projects would work in southern Africa and in francophone West Africa, the Sahel region, probably in Asia, in Latin America. It depends,” Marmora said.
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See also:

*World Unprepared To Cope With Emerging Infectious Diseases*
_ May 23, 2016 — The director-general of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, warns the world is not ready to cope with the threats posed by emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Chan told some 3,500 delegates attending the annual World Health Assembly they must work together to overcome global health threats._


> World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan told a gathering of health ministers and providers that countries could no longer work in isolation to contain infectious diseases and overcome other health threats.
> Waking an old disease
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> She says few threats are local anymore. She says people and goods move around in this interconnected world and so do diseases.For example, she notes drug-resistant pathogens, including the growing number of “superbugs,” travel internationally in people, animals, and food.  “The Ebola outbreak in three small countries paralyzed the world with fear and travel constraints….The rapidly evolving outbreak of Zika, Zika virus warns us that an old disease that slumbered for six decades in Africa and Asia can suddenly wake up, wake up on a new continent to cause a global health emergency.”  The Zika virus is particularly dangerous to pregnant women as it is linked with brain abnormalities in newborn babies.
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## waltky (Oct 24, 2016)

Complacency Has Allowed TB to Explode...




*Global Efforts to Control TB Are Falling Short*
_October 22, 2016 - This year's U.N. report on tuberculosis was a shocker. The World Health Organization's Global TB Report 2016 said the spread of the disease is larger than previously estimated, and that global efforts to beat it are falling far short of what is needed._


> Although the overall number of TB deaths continues to fall across the globe, new data showed 50 percent more cases exist in India than previously thought, so the total number of cases worldwide has increased from 9.6 million to 10.4 million. Six countries - India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa - account for 60 percent of the total number of people with TB.  Dr. Eric Goosby, the United Nations Special Envoy on Tuberculosis, told VOA in a Skype interview that because of better surveillance, the numbers are more accurate. But on the other hand, he said, not all cases of TB are being counted, because many countries have outdated surveillance systems.
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> Scientific modeling shows that more than four million people with TB are not being treated, but no one knows where they are. This means the disease is spreading undetected. That, Goosby said, is what worries him.  "TB is the threat that can be spread by an aerosolized spread: not by behavior that increases your risk, but by standing behind somebody in line who coughs and infects you with a micro-bacterium. No high-risk behavior associated with it other than [being in the] wrong place at the wrong time."  Within weeks after exposure to tuberculosis, a person develops a cough, fever, night sweats, then starts to lose weight. TB usually attacks the lungs, but it can attack any organ. It kills 5,000 people a day, more than the number of people who die of malaria and HIV. "And we cannot find it in our country budgets to prioritize TB as a health threat," Goosby said.  Like Ebola, tuberculosis thrives in poor communities, where people live in crowded conditions with poor sanitation and poor nutrition.
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## esthermoon (Oct 26, 2016)

Unkotare said:


> The people in North Korea are dying from _North Korea_. Cure that disease and they'll recover quickly enough.


How?


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## anotherlife (Oct 27, 2016)

How long does it take for tuberculosis to infect a man, and then how long does it take to kill him?  I think tuberculosis goes on for years before it kills its host.


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## esthermoon (Oct 29, 2016)

This link can be useful 

tuberculosis facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about tuberculosis


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## waltky (Dec 22, 2016)

Artemisinin can be used to treat both malaria and TB...




*Study: Ancient Chinese Herb Aids Fight Against TB*
_December 21, 2016 - Scientists have found that a drug used to treat malaria may also aid in the treatment of tuberculosis. The ancient Chinese herb, artemisinin, has the potential to shorten how long it takes to treat TB, something that could also fight drug resistance to antibiotics._


> Scientists say they don't know yet by how much time artemisinin might shorten a course of standard anti-TB drugs, but experiments in the test tube suggest that it could have a significant impact.  The bacterium that causes tuberculosis can lie dormant for years before taking advantage of a weakened immune system to 'wake up' and spread.  It's believed a significant portion of the world’s population has latent TB. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of the world's population is infected with TB, which killed 1.8 million people in 2015.  Experts say those with the active form of the disease also harbor dormant bacteria, a state in which they are largely resistant to antibiotics. That’s why it takes six months or longer to treat TB with antibiotics.
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> Now, researchers at Michigan State University have discovered that artemisinin, a mainstay of malaria treatment, prevents the pathogen that causes TB from going into a dormant state, exposing more of the bacteria to the drugs.  Microbiologist Robert Abramovitch is a TB expert. He notes that many people who start taking antibiotics begin to feel better in a few days, as the active bacteria are killed. So they stop taking their pills, potentially causing a resistant strain of tuberculosis to develop.  “It’s the dormant bacteria that take a long time to kill," he stresses. "So if we can kill the dormant bacteria with, let’s say, artemisinin or some of the other compounds we discovered, we can maybe shorten the course of therapy, and by doing that, we can reduce the sorts of clinical behaviors that are driving the evolution of drug resistant strains.”  The finding was published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
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