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Gates boosts fight against TB
Tamar Kahn
2006-01-31

CAPE TOWN World leaders and US software giant Bill Gates lent their voices to the global campaign against tuberculosis (TB) on Friday, unveiling at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a 56bn plan to fight the disease. The plan aims to treat 50-million patients and prevent 14-million deaths by 2015, and will be the work of the Stop Tuberculosis Partnership, an association of governments, health organisations, donors and grassroots bodies.

But countries will have to develop their own strategies for achieving goals. Other aims include launching a new TB drug by 2010 and a new vaccine by 2015.

Health department spokesman Sibane Mngadi said yesterday that the department had finalised a new TB crisis plan, which the health minister would launch within the next month.

An estimated 250000 new cases of TB are diagnosed in SA each year, placing it near the top of the worlds 22 high burden countries, said Prof Nulda Beyers, head of the Desmond Tutu TB centre at the University of Stellenbosch . The sad thing is TB is curable, but we are a long way from the World Health Organisation (WHO) target of an 85% cure rate.

TB kills 2-million people globally each year, a quarter of them in Africa .

TB control on the continent faced severe challenges, including poverty and weak healthcare systems, the partnership said. These problems are compounded by Africa s HIV pandemic, which increases the risk of contracting TB.

The WHO declared TB an emergency in Africa last August, noting that the disease had tripled in countries with high HIV incidence.

About a third of the funding needed to implement the Global Plan to Stop TB is for Africa, with 15,8bn required by high-burden countries such as SA, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe , and another 3,6bn for countries with lower prevalence.

The plan faces a funding shortfall of 25bn, which the Stop TB partnership said it hoped would be met by national governments and donors.

This is a very tough disease, Gates told a press conference in Davos.

He promised to triple his funding to the programme from 300m to 900m by 2015. WIth Sapa-AP

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