Tuberculosis Now Rivals AIDS As Leading Cause of Death, Says WHO
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Reflection/Next StepsAfter reading this article, I was not fully aware that TB was actually a big problem again in the world. At first I looked at it as a problem only in smaller undeveloped countries but now learning that this is starting to become more infectious than HIV/AIDS is very scary to think about. I was very interested in seeing the differences between the numbers both these diseases were putting up but also worried because they were so high. I believe that we should not be putting our time, effort, or money into comparing the rates at which these diseases get contracted, rather we should focus more on curing BOTH of these terrible diseases that is taking many peoples lives. The only way I can think of trying to help scientists with their research is by taking their funds and focusing it ALL on the process of finding cures to this infectious disease. We can also try and to reduce our population size. With the reduction of population size, not only will we reduce the amount of people contracting these diseases but it can reduce the spread of them as well.
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SummaryFor the first time ever, tuberculosis infections has caught up to HIV/AIDS as the leading infectious disease that causes death. This does inclued the 400,000 people who were both infected with HIV and tuberculosis. Some statistics of TB is that in 2014, it killed 1.4 million people. At the same time however, HIV/AIDS killed 1.2 million people. According to Dr. Mario Raviglione, these reports are reflective of how people are getting treated for HIV/AIDS and helping people survive the infection. According to this article, "'The good news is that TB intervention has saved some 43 million lives since 2000'". It was also found that there are 6 million new cases of TB that were reported in 2014 which is less than two-thirds of the 9.6 million people who were estimated to catch TB worldwide. Within the 480,000 cases of multi-drug resistant TB in 2014 only one in four was diagnosed. Even with all this commotion, there still remains a $1.4 billion gap in the amount of funding needed for TB interventions in 2015.
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