Světový den tuberkulosy
TB Day: The Worldwide Fight goes on!
On March 17th, just one week before World TB Day, the WHO annual report “Global Tuberculosis Control” has been published. It reports the findings for 2006 and shows a slight slowdown in the progress on diagnosing people with tuberculosis (TB) compared to the previous years.
With about 9 million new cases and more than 1.5 million deaths per year TB remains the world’s second most cause of death from an infectious agent, after HIV. The HIV epidemic itself has a huge impact, driving up incidence rates for TB dramatically, because a person infected with HIV has a 10 times increased risk of developing TB. Therefore early access to testing and early diagnosis are crucial factors in the worldwide struggle against both TB and HIV.
New challenges are also posed by multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and even extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB), which is practically untreatable.
TB is definitely a worldwide threat. Though most of the cases are detected in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the importation of TB, including MDR-TB, from Eastern Europe and other countries to the EU is a serious concern for the European Union. In addition TB is also present in Northern America.
Apart from the enormous relevance of the TB epidemic for people’s health it is also an economic problem of great scale. Several studies have shown that it causes damages in a magnitude of many billions of € in emerging countries. Furthermore, transferring cost data from a German study to the scale of the entire EU shows that TB associated costs within the EU are in the magnitude of more than € 1 billion per year.
Based on the above findings, EDMA believes that it is of tremendous value, both clinically and economically, to have access in all countries to modern rapid tests for detection of TB and for drug susceptibility testing, including NAT tests, to ensure effective chemotherapy and to prevent the further spread of drug-resistant forms of TB. Further, modern methods for detecting TB infection before it progresses to disease stages have been recently developed and validated by the scientific community. These tests afford new opportunities for systematically reducing the number of persons who fall victim to TB.
Though it is a permanent obligation to develop advanced tests with respect to convenience, affordability and specifity, EDMA feels that one challenging objective at present is to make consequent use of the tests which are available today. There is abundant data which shows that this would lead to improved patient care as well as to overall cost savings. In Vitro Diagnostics represents less than 2% of the health expenses but influences about 65% of the medical decision.
EDMA cooperates with the “Stop TB Partnership”, a worldwide network of more than 500 international organizations, donors and institutions that work together to fight TB and is committed to bring its best support to reach the objectives fixed by the partnership.
About EDMA
EDMA, the European Diagnostic Manufacturers Association represents National Associations and major companies engaged in the research, development, manufacture or distribution of In Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) medical devices in Europe. Through its affiliated National Associations, EDMA represents in total more than 500 companies (or over 700 legal entities) across Europe. The mission of EDMA is to raise awareness of the importance, usefulness and added-value that diagnostic information can provide to healthcare. For this purpose, EDMA cooperates with European institutions, patients groups, trade associations, health professionals and academia to support an appropriate regulatory system, to work towards a realistic economic environment for healthcare in Europe and to be an effective voice in globalisation.