‘Latent’ Tuberculosis? It’s Not That Common

‘Latent’ Tuberculosis? It’s Not That Common, Experts Find

Although experts frequently assert that almost 1.7 billion people carry dormant tuberculosis worldwide, that figure could also be a “gross exaggeration” of the important threat, a recent study concludes.

The study, published last month within the journal BMJ, found that almost everyone who falls seriously ill with TB does so within two years of getting infected. So-called latent infections only rarely become active, even in adulthood.

Researchers “have spent many many dollars chasing after latency, but the whole concept 1 / 4 of the planet is infected with TB is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Dr. Lalita Ramakrishnan, a tuberculosis expert at the University of Cambridge and one among the study’s authors.

The challenge to standard wisdom comes at an opportune time. On Sept. 18, the World Health Organization issued its annual TB report, and on Sept. 26, the United Nations General Assembly will hold its first high-level meeting on the disease.

No one questions how great a threat active tuberculosis is. round the world, the disease kills quite 4,000 people a day; in 2015, tuberculosis surpassed AIDS as an explanation for death.

(TB has not become more lethal, nor AIDS less so. The difference is that 20 million people, mostly in Africa, are now on H.I.V.-suppressing drugs.)

Although the incidence of TB is falling slowly around the world, some regions fare much worse than others. for instance, South Africa, Mozambique and therefore the Philippines have especially high infection rates.

Drug-resistant TB remains a crisis, the W.H.O. reported, and just three countries — India, China, and Russia — account for nearly half the cases.

And the “global treatment success rate” is dropping. The figure was 82 percent in 2016, down from 86 percent three years earlier.

Success in treating drug-resistant forms is even lower, at 55 percent, although some relatively poor countries, like Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar and Vietnam, do better than average.

The BMJ study was amid an article endorsing its conclusions, written by Dr.

Soumya Swaminathan, a tuberculosis expert, and deputy the director-general of the W.H.O. She argued that experts should specialize in the 55 million people at the highest risk of active infection: young children with infected relatives, the severely malnourished, and other people with H.I.V. or other immunosuppressive conditions.

Experts at nonprofits just like the TB Alliance and therefore the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease agreed with the main conclusions of the new study and the need to specialize inactive instead of latent disease.

But finding tests to inform which carriers of latent infections are presumably to fall ill remains crucial, said Dr. Daniel E. Everitt, the alliance’s senior medic.

Dr. Ramakrishnan’s study analyzed reports of local TB outbreaks going back to the 1930s, before antibiotics were invented, in places just like the Faroe Islands that were so sparsely populated that it had been possible to pinpoint exactly who infected whom and when.

Reports on outbreaks as recent as three years ago within the Netherlands and Canada similarly showed that the overwhelming majority of active cases came from recent infections, not latent infections that became active.

The misconception that 1.7 billion people are walking time bombs, potentially capable of developing and communicating full-blown TB, comes from the very fact that skin and blood tests for the bacterium confirm only that the body once mounted an immune response to exposure.

The tests don't tell if the bacteria are still alive within the body, said Dr. Paul H. Edelstein, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the new study.

Who succumbs is perhaps determined partially by genetic makeup, said Dr.

Ramakrishnan, who studies the genetics of TB in zebrafish. She cited the “Lübeck disaster,” a famous incident within the history of vaccines.

In 1929, 250 German infants got a TB vaccine that was accidentally contaminated with live bacteria.

a few thirds died, and another third fell seriously ill — but a 3rd survived unscathed, possibly because that they had innate resistance.

At next week’s U.N. meeting, member states are expected to pledge to extend efforts to treat the infected and try to more research.

The organization has estimated that an additional $3.5 billion a year is required for tuberculosis treatment, alongside over $1.3 billion more for research.

In August, the W.H.O. issued new treatment guidelines for drug-resistant TB that believe newer oral drugs like bedaquiline and delamanid, instead of older injectables with harsh side effects.

But newer drugs are expensive, and months of tense behind-the-scenes negotiations preceded the high-level meeting, consistent with the property Watch website.

The debate pitted South Africa and therefore the medical charity Doctors borderless against us delegation, which was defending the interests of pharmaceutical companies.

The South Africans and therefore the charity wanted the meeting’s declaration to acknowledge that, under international treaties going back to 1994, poor countries may override patents and import generic drugs once they cannot afford prices that pharmaceutical companies charge.

The final language didn't spell that out but cited the treaties and said intellectual property rights should be interpreted to “promote access to medicines for all.”