Tuberculosis (TB) mortality has fallen 47% since 1990, and the reporting on incidences of the disease has improved, says a global report by the World Health Organization (WHO). News about this disease is not all positive, however; TB continues to be one of the world’s deadliest diseases and many cases of TB went unreported last year, according to the WHO report.
Most improvements in mortality rate for TB patients occurred at the beginning of the 21st century, when the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals, says the report. Such goals included halting and reversing TB incidence on a worldwide basis, in each of the 6 WHO regions, and in 16 of the 22 high-burden countries that collectively account for 80% of TB cases.
CDC/Janice Carr
“In all, effective diagnosis and treatment of TB saved an estimated 43 million lives between 2000 and 2014,” says the report.
Better reporting on TB’s prevalence led to the first increase in the number of TB cases reported since 2007.
“The annual total of new TB cases, which had been about 5.7 million until 2013, rose to slightly more than 6 million in 2014 (an increase of 6%). This was mostly due to a 29% increase in notification in India, which followed the introduction of a policy of mandatory notification in May 2012, creation of a national Web-based reporting system in June 2012, and intensified efforts to engage the private health sector,” according to the report.
Despite these improvements in data collection of TB incidents, 37% of new TB cases were undiagnosed or not reported last year, with 9.6 million people having fallen sick to TB during a year when just 6 million new cases were reported, according to estimates. Regarding multidrug-resistant TB cases specifically, only 123,000 of an estimated 480,000 cases were detected and reported.
As for the deadliness of the disease, TB killed 1.5 million people in 2014.
Read the full report on the WHO website.