- Tuberculosis is the world's largest infectious disease and is estimated to infect 10 million people each year. One study concludes that in coronavirus containment, more cases will appear, as the situation hinders testing at risk groups.
The World Health Organization estimates that about 1.5 million people died of tuberculosis in 2018 from the disease. Of these, over 200,000 were boys and girls. These data are worrying, especially because it is a disease that is being treated.
The response to tuberculosis is to carry out tests and treatment of patients. But containment will condition that response, because people are confined because testing is more difficult for health professionals. In this sense, a study indicates that the new outbreak could be "potentially destructive", according to the research carried out.
A long-term problem
A group of London epidemiologists, Imperial College, has revealed in a study conducted in India, Kenya and Ukraine that if they were confined two months worldwide and the world quickly regained its initial march, they could infect 1.8 million people in the next five years and 340,000 deaths.
However, this data would be worse if the confinement were prolonged: if we were confined three months and returned to the first march for ten months, it would be six million infections and 1.4 million deaths in 2025.
To date, no links have been found between TB and COVID-19, but both affect the lungs. “We know that tuberculosis affects the lungs, so we can expect the incidence of COVID-19 to be worse when your lung capacity is affected,” says Nimalan Arinaminpathy, a member of the research group.