A good price to pay
An $8 billion investment could cure TB by 2045
Tuberculosis, the deadly disease that killed 1.6 million people in 2017, could be eradicated by 2045. But achieving this reality, once thought to be a pipe dream, will require a significant investment — $2 billion per year for the next four years, to be exact.
This estimate was made by a group of 37 commissioners from 13 countries in a report recently published by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Tuberculosis research is woefully underfunded at the moment, limiting scientists’ ability to create and distribute more sophisticated TB tests and treatments. Diagnosing TB cases earlier — 35 percent of current TB cases go undiagnosed or untreated — would help stem the tide of the deadly disease.
The World Health Organization declared tuberculosis a “global health emergency” in 1993, but the disease has actually been afflicting human beings since antiquity. There is evidence of tuberculosis as many as 9,000 years ago, and it has been a continual blight on humans since. There was a brief period of hope that TB could be eradicated in the early 20th century, but the rise of drug-resistant strains in the 1980s reinvigorated the disease’s devastating reach.
So researchers are asking for $8 billion over four years, which would be invested in better tests, better treatments and expanding the scope of medical professionals seeking to kill the disease. They will likely have to start in the eight countries that accounted for two-thirds of the new TB cases in 2017: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Pakistan and South Africa.
In a statement on the commission’s report, Victoria Fan, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Hawaii, spoke to the potential impact of increased investment in TB research. “If we direct global resources to curing people and preventing the spread of TB,” she said, “we would save millions of lives and enormous amounts of money in the long run.”
The commission specifically noted its hope that a group of countries could scrounge the $8 billion needed to fund a vital four-year period of tuberculosis research. But why not a wealthy benefactor like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates? A donation of $8 billion would hardly put a dent in either of their pocketbooks while delivering a meaningful message of the power of philanthropy.
But whoever ends up footing the bill, spending $8 billion to cure one of the world’s most pernicious diseases in 26 years seems like an awfully good price to pay.