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oct 26, 2016
In rich countries, tuberculosis is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past, the disease that claimed Keats, Poe, Chopin.
But globally, TB is today the number one infectious killer, causing an estimated 1.8m deathsin 2015.
Unlike many bugs, infection with the bacterium that causes TB doesn’t usually result in disease.
The usual dictum is that only 10% of people who are infected willever develop TB, but this may occur many years after initial infection.
The flip side of this is that latent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis is far more common than the disease – and it is commonly stated that a third of all people worldwide carry it.
However, the last systematic attempt to estimate the number of latent TB infections was 20 years ago. Since then, many things have changed. The world population has increased by over 20% and grown older; in China, the median age has increased by ten years over this period. At the same time, children make up nearly half of the population in most sub-Saharan countries in Africa.
The fraction of people with TB disease has declined, despite upswings associated with HIV in some regions through the nineties. Developing new ways to address the pool of latent TB infection is now seen as an emerging front in its control. Clearly it’s time to reevaluate the “one-third” figure, which has become an oral tradition.
In a new paper published in PLOS Medicine, we reconstructed the “force of infection” for TB – the chance that an individual would become infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis – in 180 countries (equivalent to about 99% of the world’s population) over the past 80 years.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE
In rich countries, tuberculosis is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past, the disease that claimed Keats, Poe, Chopin.
But globally, TB is today the number one infectious killer, causing an estimated 1.8m deathsin 2015.
Unlike many bugs, infection with the bacterium that causes TB doesn’t usually result in disease.
The usual dictum is that only 10% of people who are infected willever develop TB, but this may occur many years after initial infection.
The flip side of this is that latent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis is far more common than the disease – and it is commonly stated that a third of all people worldwide carry it.
However, the last systematic attempt to estimate the number of latent TB infections was 20 years ago. Since then, many things have changed. The world population has increased by over 20% and grown older; in China, the median age has increased by ten years over this period. At the same time, children make up nearly half of the population in most sub-Saharan countries in Africa.
The fraction of people with TB disease has declined, despite upswings associated with HIV in some regions through the nineties. Developing new ways to address the pool of latent TB infection is now seen as an emerging front in its control. Clearly it’s time to reevaluate the “one-third” figure, which has become an oral tradition.
In a new paper published in PLOS Medicine, we reconstructed the “force of infection” for TB – the chance that an individual would become infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis – in 180 countries (equivalent to about 99% of the world’s population) over the past 80 years.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE
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