Covid-19 lockdown risks 1.4m extra TB deaths: study

PARIS: The global lockdown caused by Covid-19 risks a "devastating" surge in tuberculosis cases, with nearly 1.4 million additional deaths from the world’s biggest infectious killer by 2025, new research showed Wednesday.

TB, a bacterial infection that normally attacks patients’ lungs, is largely treatable yet still infects an estimated 10 million people every year.

In 2018, it killed around 1.5 million people, according to the World Health Organization, including more than 200,000 children.

Since effective medication exists, the world’s TB response is centred on testing and treating as many patients as possible.

But as Covid-19 forces governments to place populations on lockdown, new disease models showed that social distancing could lead to a disastrous rebound in TB infections -- the effects of which are set to persist for years.

This is because social distancing will make it impossible for health care workers to test vulnerable populations and for patients to access ongoing treatments.

"In spite of having drugs and treatment... we are not yet close to ending it and TB remains the biggest infectious disease killer," said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership.

"Covid has hit us very hard. The more people we have not diagnosed and treated the more problems we will have in the coming years."

Models developed in partnership with epidemiologists at Imperial College London used TB response data from three high-incidence countries: India, Kenya and Ukraine.