Incidentally, 25 percent of the TB patients in Kerala are diabetics, which points to the fact that diabetes patients are more prone to the infection, said Bindu K M, district TB officer.
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This 10-year discovery effort was led by scientists at the SA Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI) and the Centre for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) in Seattle, US.
In its press release, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted that TB ranks alongside HIV/AIDS as the worlds top infectious disease killer, while shining a spotlight on progress made in several countries, including India, South Africa, Russia, Brazil and Viet Nam. In terms of per capita rate, tuberculosis is now infects three out of every 100,000 people.
Overall, TB incidence leveled off at about three new cases per 100,000 people each year between 2013 and 2015, according to preliminary data from the CDC.
There are two types of testing for tuberculosis: a skin test and a blood test. The blood test is for those who have a higher risk of contracting the disease.
“Most of the increase in cases we saw was in the northern part of the state, and it was in settings where people are in close quarters like shelters or halfway homes”, Arnold said. It also assured that its End TB Strategy aims to reduce TB deaths by 90 per cent and cut new cases by 80 per cent between 2015 and 2030, and to ensure that no affected family faces catastrophic costs due to the disease.
In 2015, 21 cases reported to the Washington State Department of Health, were resistant to one or more drugs now used as a “first line of treatment” for TB; four were multi-drug resistant. The way to prevent and eliminate TB is to treat it worldwide.
It’s against this background that World Health Organisation (WHO) endorsed the use of Lateral Flow Urine Lipoarabinomannan (LF- LAM) urine-test as the best intervention and a cheaper way for the diagnosis and screening of active tuberculosis in people living with HIV especially in developing countries were affordability matters.
World TB Day is held across the globe to raise awareness about the effects and treatment options for tuberculosis. “An estimated 2.4 million people in California are infected with tuberculosis and don’t even know it. People at risk need to be tested – and if they are infected, they need to get treatment”. “This is unacceptable, particularly when this suffering is associated with a disease that is both treatable and curable”, states WHO. But only a small proportion of these people will develop the TB disease.
According to health practitioners, for severely ill patients with TB and HIV, it can be hard to produce sputum and alternative approaches and in most sputum induction or alternative invasive sampling are often unavailable.
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In his message on the Day, the Prime Minister has emphasized diseases-free society to make Pakistan a developed country.
