Thanks to Peter Daou, activist and political and digital media consultant, for alerting me to a growing global ‘super-epidemic’ of a merged form of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.
The human toll is staggering. In some sampled populations, fatality rates approach 100 percent. Drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), virtually impervious to even the most effective drugs, has now been reported in 45 countries, including all the G8 nations.
This video from Doctors Without Borders, from Khayelitsha township in South Africa which has one of the highest rates of TB (tuberculosis) and HIV in the world, makes clear the depths of the problem.
(Tuberculosis, a community approach from MSF on Vimeo.)
The good news is that new scientific modeling shows that these trends can be reversed, saving a million lives from TB-HIV disease between now and 2015 with technology and knowledge we already possess. The goal is to convince governments and NGOs to act.
That’s where the Advocacy to Control Tuberculosis Internationally (ACTION), a project of advocates working to mobilize resources to treat and prevent the spread of TB, comes in. ACTION’s premise is that more rapid progress can be made against the global TB epidemic by building increased support for resources for effective TB control among key policymakers and other opinion leaders in both high TB burden countries (HBCs) and donor countries.
Read the ACTION Brochure to find out more about the group, and learn what you can do to help prevent the spread of infectious disease among the global poor.
