Persons with tuberculosis (TB) cannot transmit the infection anymore once they get treated, an expert from the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.
“This is the amazing thing about the current medicines we have for TB. We have done studies which say two weeks of treatment and you’re no longer infectious,” WHO TB Officer Thomas Dale Hiatt said during a media forum in Pasay City.
While some doctors still advise their patients to isolate and avoid sharing personal items during treatment, the infection is spread through the air and not through shared use of utensils and glasses, among others, Hiatt said.
“They can take their medication in the morning, then they go to work, they can go to school, they can meet their friends. There is no problem,” he said.
However, undiagnosed and untreated active TB is infectious.
Hence, the WHO pushes for the observation of active case-finding.
According to the Global Tuberculosis Report 2024, TB returned to be the world’s leading infectious disease killer in 2023.
About 10.8 million people fell ill with TB that year and 1.25 million died of the disease.
The TB incidence rate is estimated to have increased by 4.6 percent between 2020 and 2023, revising the decline of about 2 percent yearly between 2010 and 2020.
Two-thirds of the global total of TB cases are from eight countries – India, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Hiatt said the WHO recommends TB preventive treatment for people living with HIV, the household contacts of those with bacteriologically confirmed pulmonary TB; and clinical risk groups like people receiving dialysis.
In 2023, a total of 4.3 million people received preventive treatment for TB.
About 58 countries began to use the all-oral six-month BPaLM/BPal regimen to treat people with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR/RR-TB) or pre-extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (pre-XDR-TB) by the end of 2023.
There was an increase in access to a shorter (one to three months) rifamycin-based regiment for TB preventive treatment for the same year, he added. (PNA)
