Life on Pause

This is Anastasia Novikova. She’s 17 and she’s in the fight of her life.

By The Global Fund

August 1^st, 2018

Anastasia is a regular teenager in all ways but one. She has multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. She still chats with her friends on social media, cuddles her cat and goes for walks in her neighborhood. But in many ways, her life is on pause – no school, no work – while she is on treatment. Every day for a minimum of 20 months, she takes a potent cocktail of drugs to rid her body of TB.

TB is preventable and curable, but it is also contagious and airborne. And it is increasingly resistant to first-line TB drugs. Today, TB is the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

“THE TREATMENT IS HARD. YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG. I DON’T KNOW WHAT KEEPS ME STRONG. I JUST KNOW IT’S NECESSARY TO BE CURED, TO HAVE THE WILL TO LIVE.”- ANASTASIA NOVIKOVA

2016: 10.4 million new cases worldwide. 1.7 million deaths.

Drug resistance emerges when TB medicines are used inappropriately, through incorrect prescription by health care providers, poor quality drugs, and patients stopping treatment prematurely.

TB continues to be a major public health issue in Europe, especially in Anastasia’s home country of Belarus. Eastern Europe’s burden of multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB is among the highest in the world. In Belarus, nearly 38 percent of new TB cases are MDR. By comparison, in neighboring Poland the figure is 0.8 percent and the global average is just over 4 percent.

Globally, the cure rate for patients with MDR-TB is 54 percent.

The Global Fund supports countries to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment – to meet the target of ending the TB epidemic by 2030.

About one-third of the world’s population is infected with TB bacteria. Only a small proportion of those infected will become sick with TB, but this global reservoir of tuberculosis means we all have a stake in this fight.

New TB infections are falling at about 2 percent per year. By 2025, these figures need to improve to 10 percent per year to reach the goal of ending the epidemic by 2035.

Source: WHO Global Tuberculosis Report 2017

Anastasia is on track to beat TB. But the global picture is alarming. We have known how to cure TB since the middle of the last century, but we have yet to gain the upper hand against the disease. As we prepare to meet future threats to global health security, we must invest to win today’s fights.