Throughout time, mankind's ingenuity has been breathtaking:
We've discovered fire...
Invented the wheel...
Created the world wide web.
Yet for centuries one tiny microorganism has defied us.
I feel that Tuberculosis at present is like a time bomb...
and it will blast anytime.
Tuberculosis is one of the world's foremost infectious killers...
infecting nine million new people every year.
and now the bacterium is mutating
into far deadly forms.
You should be not just worried but very worried about drug resistant TB.
There is as an estimated over 600,000 cases in
the world and these cases are everywhere. They are in Europe, they're in Africa, they're in Asia
they are on everybody's doorstep. It is everybody's problem now.
Drug-resistant TB does not respond to the first-line antibiotics used to treat
standard TB. It's airbourne, infectious
and spreading indiscriminately.
We are now facing a major emergency with drug-resistant TB...
with increasing numbers around the world.
In all of our projects when we look we are finding
patients in really large numbers.
One infected person can spread TB to another 15 more person in the year
so if we don't reduce multi-drug resistant TB
then there will be a lot of open cases and it will keep mounting up
again more and more.
Despite the growing global health threat, the response is shockingly inadequate.
Today, barely one in twenty TB patients is probably tested for drug resistance...
and new tools for rapid diagnosis have yet to reach many places.
After recieving the report...
that my daughter died on (MDRTB)...
I nearly had a stroke. She was tested in time
but I was told that the results would come
after six weeks. Six weeks came,
two months came, three months came, four months came
that time she was dead already.
If maybe there was a way of getting the treatment sooner
she wouldn't die.
For Briggitte's daughter the long diagnosis period cost her life
but not before the resistant strain of TB had spread to her young son.
Thankfully a new rapid diagnostic test enabled Savouley
to get the right treatment fast.
Now he faces the next big challenge.
As a medical doctor I find it extremely
conflicting to put a patient on MDR-TB treatment.
First of all the drugs are toxic
They are minimally effective and they can cause
long drawn-out suffering and lasting side effects.
[The drugs make you very weak]
[I can't even sit up for ten minutes, for two to three hours after i've taken them]
[I always have to stay lying down. I can only spend an hour or two on my feet each day]
After two years taking thousands of pills and receiving hundreds of injections
patients have a paltry 50 percent chance of cure.
And with no formulations for children available
the situation is critical.
We are in a very terrible situation at the moment. Only about one in five patients are
estimated to get treatment, this is woefully inadequate.
Add to that the extortionate cost of the drugs
and grossly inadequate international funding and it's clear we face an
impending disaster.
The Global Fund is the most important international donor for TB
providing around ninety percent of the funding. In the last round actually TB was
deprioritized and receive a smaller share of funding
and this undermines what we're trying to do
in the field and it sends a very bad negative message
about how important TB is as a priority.
The price of not acting is really too frightening
to comprehend. We need more research
and development, we need more innovation and we need
better tools.