Tuberculosis

A global epidemic
What is tuberculosis?
Tuberculosis on the move
What is Canada doing?
Find out more:

What if someone told you that, a hundred years ago, tuberculosis (TB) was the leading cause of death worldwide? Perhaps it wouldn't be surprising, given that medical science and immunology were in their infancy.

But say you were told that, this year, more people worldwide will die from TB than ever before? Would that surprise you, especially since a cure for TB has been available for more than fifty years?

---

A global epidemic

Ten years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) was so concerned about the modern TB epidemic that they declared the disease a global emergency. Today, TB is killing approximately 2 million people each year. This global epidemic is growing and becoming more dangerous every year. Why? In large part, it is because of inadequate health services in developing countries, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and strains of TB that have become resistant to treatment. If TB continues to spread at the current rate, it is estimated that by 2020 another billion people will be infected with TB bacteria, more than 150 million people will get sick from it, and 36 million will die of the disease.

---

What is tuberculosis?

TB is a contagious bacterial disease that generally affects the lungs. Like the common cold, it spreads through air. When people who are sick with TB-they are said to have active TB-sneeze, cough, talk, or spit, they release TB bacteria into the air. A person only needs to inhale a small number of these bacteria to become infected.

Left untreated, each person with active TB will infect between 10 and 15 people every year, on average. But people infected with TB do not necessarily get sick with the disease. A strong immune system walls off the TB bacteria, which can then lie dormant for years. But people with weakened immune systems-people infected with HIV, for example-are more likely to become sick with TB.



Tuberculosis on the move

In today's world, people move around a lot. Global trade and the number of people who travel by airplane have increased dramatically over the past forty years. The number of refugees and displaced people in the world is also increasing. Untreated, TB spreads quickly in crowded refugee camps and shelters. As many as 50 percent of the world's refugees could be infected with TB.

It is difficult to treat mobile populations, as treatment takes at least six months and works best under supervision. When TB-infected people move, they may spread the disease to a new community or country.

---

What is Canada doing?

Canada supports international commitments to:

• identify at least 70 percent of infectious TB cases world-wide and cure 85 percent of those people, by 2005;
• cut the number of deaths due to TB and the number of people infected with TB in half by 2010; and
• halt and begin to reverse the spread of TB throughout the world by 2015.

Canada is also a member of the WHO-supported Stop TB Partnership, which is active worldwide. Through the Stop TB Partnership, Canada helped to found the Global TB Drug Facility (GDF) to improve access to good-quality anti-TB drugs in poor countries. Since it was established in 2001, the GDF has succeeded in reducing the cost of a six-month course of anti-TB drugs by 30 percent.

Through CIDA, Canada is helping to treat and control TB in a number of developing countries. The primary strategy for detecting and curing TB is DOTS (directly observed treatment, short-course). One of the key elements of DOTS is that every dose of medicine taken is observed and recorded by an authorized person, ensuring that patients take all their medicine. This is critical: people living in poverty often stop treatment once their symptoms have ceased or their medication runs out, and when patients fail to finish their prescribed drugs, some TB bacteria survive. These bacteria may become resistant to the drugs and make future treatment of the disease more challenging.

---

Find out more:

Stop TB Canada
World Health Organization (WHO) tuberculosis portal
WHO tuberculosis fact sheet
Stop TB Partnership