To the UN, the WHO and the Stop TB Partnership: where are the targets for MDR- and XDR-TB?
Today is the UN's World Day of Social Justice. It's been marked on February 20th each year since 2007 (in recognition that exclusion and inequality are both globally on the rise). Well the right of access to effective treatment for MDR- and XDR-TB is undeniably an issue of social justice. It's one, as Joni Mitchell once put it, of "who gets the gravy, who gets the gristle, and who gets the marrow bone - and who gets nothing though there's plenty to share..." Actually there's
How to manage a drug-resistant pandemic? (2) Estimating the burden of disease at a national level…
In the previous blog we discussed the ways that the WHO generally use to estimate the proportion of the global TB pandemic that's drug-resistant, concluding that the method seems to be fundamentally flawed and that it's almost certainly dangerously under-estimating the threat. In contrast, in this blog we take a look at one particular country – at South Africa – and we examine how the estimates for MDR-TB and the notified numbers are being incoherently represented and report
How to manage a drug-resistant pandemic (1) - estimating the global burden
For some time we’ve been struggling to figure out how the WHO has been reporting that the proportion of MDR-TB hasn’t been rising (or at least that it has “changed little in recent years”). This isn’t just for the last couple of years, by the way, it’s been reported it this way for about a decade - in fact for almost half of the period during which TB has been an official Global Emergency. In 1993, when the emergency was first declared, MDR-TB was hardly being taken seriously
