Tuberculosis replaces COVID-19 as world’s deadliest infectious disease

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Tuberculosis has regained its position as the deadliest infectious disease in the world. The world health organisation has found 1.25 million people died from the bacterial infection last year.

Transcript

00:00Tuberculosis, or TB, is a highly infectious disease caused by a bacteria.

00:09And we know that globally TB has, even before COVID, was one of the biggest killer or infectious

00:15diseases killer.

00:17And most of the burden that we see is in low and middle income country.

00:22It's a disease of poverty.

00:23It's often associated with poor living conditions or social conditions.

00:28And so often we see very high burdens in low and middle income country, including many

00:32countries in our region, such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, where we see a

00:37lot of high burden of tuberculosis, but also we see the disease affect people living in

00:43Australia as well.

00:45It's a preventable disease.

00:46It's also a curable disease, but ultimately there are lots of different complex factors

00:52that are at play.

00:53You can detect it, so there are really more and more advances being made in how the disease

00:59is detected and how it's treated.

01:01But there are a couple of big things.

01:02First, it's a disease of poverty, and because the way it spreads, it spreads when people

01:07are living in close contact settings.

01:09So unless some of those more, as we call them, social determinants of health are addressed,

01:14we're going to continue to face this challenge of TB transmission in many settings.

01:19But also from a, I guess, public health, medical perspective, we need to ensure that people

01:24who might be infected or are infected do have access to testing so they can get detected

01:28and be put on treatment.

01:30And the challenges with treatment as well is that it's treated by commonly used antibiotics,

01:36but it's long-term as well.

01:37So staying on that is also really important to have really good access to medical care

01:42as well.

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