Fears of mutant TB as N Korea loses funding

LEADING health experts have warned of an “explosion” in drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) in North Korea when funding to fight the deadly lung disease is withdrawn later this week.

They say life-saving treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients will end and unleash a possible public health “catastrophe”, which could spread beyond the state’s borders.

The row centres on a controversial decision by the Global Fund, the international financing organisation for combating Aids, TB and malaria, to withdraw support for the treatment in North Korea from June 30.

While the world has been anxiously fixated on Pyongyang’s nuclear threat, TB, the world’s biggest infectious killer, has been silently spreading to more than 110,000 people a year, and killing thousands in the communist state.

The isolated country has one of the highest rates of TB outside of Sub-saharan Africa, with an average of 4,000 patients annually receiving care for multi-drug resistant (MDR) strains, and about 16,000 children on prevention programmes and 7,000 in treatment. Doctors were shocked when the Global Fund announced in February that it would halt its TB funds, citing “the unique operating environment” that blocked “the required level of assurance and risk management around the deployment of resources and the effectiveness of the grant”.

The cuts would likely lead to “massive stock outs of quality-assured TB drugs nationwide” that could lead to the “rapid creation of drug-resistant TB strains” as treatment was rationed, wrote Harvard Medical School doctors in an open letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal, in March.

“An explosion of MDR TB in North Korea would take decades to clean up and could detrimentally affect bordering countries,” they warned.

The decision, the letter said, made “with almost no transparency or publicity, runs counter to the ethical aspiration of the global health community, which is to prevent death and suffering due to disease, irrespective of the government under which people live. It is indeed ‘a catastrophic betrayal of the people of DPRK’.”

But despite lobbying, the Fund has vowed to go ahead with the closure.