Category: Berita Internasional

Ten years ago, a new, unnamed disease was spreading out from China to various parts of the world, including Canada.

The emergence of SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — reminded countries that in a globalized world, diseases move as far and as fast as goods and people.

Dr. Margaret Chan was director of health for Hong Kong — a nexus of SARS — during the outbreak. Today, Chan is director general of the World Health Organization, a post she has held since late 2006.

She recently spoke with The Canadian Press about the impact SARS had on global health, whether she would use the tools employed by a predecessor in a similar situation and how she feels about a new virus that keeps pinging the world’s radar.

Note: The International Health Regulations, a treaty aimed at enhancing global health security through outbreak preparedness and transparency, were strengthened after SARS. China’s secrecy during the early stages of the outbreak meant the world was caught offguard when the outbreak emerged.

The following answers were edited and condensed.

CP: Is the world better prepared for a disease outbreak like SARS now than it was in 2003?

MC: “SARS was a very important event…. And many countries have learned from SARS…. The SARS event sort of gave them additional impetus and the sense of urgency for them to really revise the International Health Regulations.”

“…All in all, and because of the impetus coming from the SARS outbreak in 2003, countries of this organization reviewed and also renewed and also updated the IHR and all these requirements actually paved the way for countries to build their capacity and also understand the need for transparency.”

“And we have noticed that the time from event diagnosis to reporting to WHO has decreased tremendously. And the country capacity is much better than pre-SARS. It’s a long way to tell you: Yes. Because of SARS, I think the world is in a much better position to detect events.”

CP: But are some of those provisions better on paper than in reality? Indonesia wouldn’t report new bird flu cases to WHO for several years because of a dispute over access to vaccines made from H5N1 viruses. And countries in the Middle East are clearly chafing at being identified as the source of the novel coronavirus.

MC: “In disease outbreaks, when you are doing well as a country or even as a city, you are vigilant, you are being responsible, you acted in accordance to IHR requirements, you do your global responsibility, you report … you should deserve credit for having the capacity and the courage to tell the world.”

“… (But) countries for different reasons — political and otherwise — will always ban travel, will always stop their products coming (in). And this is why I’m saying it’s counterproductive, from the perspective of prompt and transparent reporting.”

“When WHO joins hands with our brothers and sisters in OIE and FAO” — the World Organization for Animal Health and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization — “to say that it is safe, no need to ban travel, no need to ban products, I wish countries would listen to them. If they do, that will help countries to be much more forthcoming.”

CP: Some people believe the response to the H1N1 pandemic was overblown. Has that hurt the agency’s capacity to urge countries to maintain their emergency preparedness efforts?

MC: “According to the IHR, it is countries’ responsibility to do emergency preparedness. Yes, of course, public opinion is important. But based on what I’m seeing, the IHR is still a live document.”

CP: During SARS, the WHO issued advisories to warn travellers away from locales that were battling the disease. It was a controversial tool, at least in Toronto. Would you use issue travel advisories in a similar situation?

MC: “That tool is still open and available to WHO. But whether or not we will use it, we have to judge the situation, whether it merits that. I cannot say yes or no. … When you’re dealing with new and emerging diseases, you have no idea and you can’t predict in advance what would happen.”

“…In the absence of complete science and information, I think the organization would make the best decision in good faith.”

CP: A new coronavirus, from the same family as SARS, emerged last year and has caused sporadic cases since. Does it give you a sense of deja vu?

MC: “I have a special interest in new and emerging infections because, perhaps, of my previous experience. I keep a very high level of vigilance.”

“…We don’t know enough now about the virus and about the disease to be able to say anything. Is it going to be having a mild phase that is not being detected early enough? It’s just like a cough and cold? Or is it only in certain individuals where you have severe disease? … This is the kind of situation that deserves a lot of humility and modesty but extremely high vigilance.”

“When you say whether I get a sense of deja vu, well I have to say yes.”

(source: www.ctvnews.ca)

Global health leaders gathered at Harvard University conclude

If the world’s nations are going to prevent tobacco smoking from causing one projected billion deaths by the end of this century, they must: Make tobacco control part of the agendas of United Nation’s and other development agencies worldwide; Assure every sector of a nation including health, trade and finance officials work collectively to protect not only health but the harm tobacco places on their economy by passing laws to reduce use; Place health as the centerpiece of any decision on a trade treaty that includes tobacco; Diligently work toward a goal of reducing the prevalence rate of smoking to less than five percent world-wide by 2048, basically ending its use.

Those were among the key recommendations to come out of an international gathering last week at Harvard University of public health officials, academics, and public health advocates from more 40 nations, and such international organizations as the European Union, the African Union, the World Trade Union, and the World Health Organization.

“The only entity in the world to benefit if tobacco use is passed down to the next generation of poor children of the world will be the tobacco industry,” warned Gregory Connolly, chair of the meeting and director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Harvard School of Public Health. “All other industries producing good products and services will suffer, not benefit, and the same is true for the economies of poor nations and their citizens,” if smoking is not snuffed out. This meeting was an historic step to make global smoking history,” said who two decades ago crafted Massachusetts’s tobacco control efforts.

And Dr. Douglas Webb of United Nations Development Program warned that “tobacco use poses a major health and human development threat. Avoidable and unnecessary, tobacco-linked illnesses strike people in their prime, hit the poorest hardest, inhibit country productivity, burden already weak healthcare systems, and consume scarce national resources.”

Sponsors of the unusual two-day conference on “Governance of Tobacco in the 21st Century,” at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, included WHO, the Harvard Global Health Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the Institute of Global Tobacco Control, at Johns Hopkins University. Meeting attendees were warned by speaker after speaker that unless there is a concerted international effort now, the plague of tobacco smoking that has claimed 100 million lives in the Developed Nations, will claim a billion in the Developing Nations, where smoking has yet to take hold as it did during the last century in the U.S. and other Developed nations.

But though the situation was described as dire, many nations present showed unity in passing tough national laws based on the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and demonstrated clear evidence of the scientific effectiveness of the FCTC in reducing use.

• Dimitry Yanin of Russia announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin banned smoking in all public places beginning this past June 2013. The legislation will also restrict cigarette sales and ban advertising and sponsorship of events by tobacco companies;
• H.E. Nicola Roxon, MP, and Former Attorney General and Minister of Health of Australia, reminded delegates to the that the Australian Supreme Court recently upheld legislation requiring plain pack cigarette packaging;
• Dr. Eduardo Bianco of Uruguay presented data on the sharp decline in smoking through the adoption of comprehensive tobacco control measures recommended by the WHO. The decline in Uruguay is comparable to that seen a decade ago in Massachusetts, where smoking is now a rarity, said MIT professor Jeffry Harris, who has evaluated both programs;
• Dr. Debby Sy, of the Philippines presented data on that nation’s recent successful efforts to greatly increase taxes on tobacco products, despite intense opposition from multi-national tobacco companies;
• And Dr. Bernard Merkel of the European Union described the EU’s new proposed directive that would allow EU nations to adopt plain packaging, high taxation, smoke-free public places and proven measures.

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Other sponsors of the meeting included the American Legacy Foundation, the World Health Organization, the International Development Research Centre, the Medical University of South Carolina, the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project, at the University of Waterloo, the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, at Georgetown University, the Framework Convention Alliance of Action on Smoking and Health, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the Southeast Asia Tobacco Alliance.

(source: www.eurekalert.org)

As early as 10 years ago, basic medical insurance was virtually nonexistent for China’s vast rural population. Back then, farmers had to pay every cent of their medical bills out of their own pockets.

According to a nationwide survey on medical services conducted by the Ministry of Health (MOH) in 2003, 45.8 percent of Chinese farmers refused to seek treatment and 30.3 percent refused hospitalization when necessary simply due to financial difficulty. The Chinese Government announced a plan to install the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme in October 2002.

The word “new” in this title of the reform indicates five characteristics that distinguish it from previous schemes: mainly financed by government subsidies; family-based voluntary participation; county-based fund pooling and management; mainly supporting treatment of critical illnesses; and supplemented by a medical aid system.

So far, 80 percent of the funds for the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme come from government investment. Last year, the annual premium paid by farmers was 60 yuan ($9.64) per person, which was subsidized by the government at 240 yuan ($38.54) per person. For the last three years, pilot programs on the coverage of critical illnesses, such as congenital heart diseases, childhood leukemia, end-stage renal diseases, severe mental illnesses, breast cancer and cervical cancer, have been carried out in many places and are still expanding. More than 70 percent of hospitalization expenses for the treatment of these diseases are refundable, compared with 48 percent in 2008.

More than 805 million people participated in the scheme in 2012, covering more than 98 percent of the total rural population and making it the largest basic medical insurance program in the world in terms of the number of participants.

“The Chinese Government has pooled a huge amount of money to ensure that more people, especially those in the countryside, have access to medical services. This is a remarkable achievement,” World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan told China Radio International in May 2012.

China’s urbanization rate reached 51.27 percent in 2011, when China’s urban population surpassed its rural population for the first time. The accelerating urbanization process entails innovative research and new policies so that social changes won’t affect health care provisions and the whole population can benefit from coordinated disease prevention and control efforts.

“The New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme has become the original model for China’s medical programs for people without stable employment, which has accumulated precious experience in promoting social reforms,” said Jiang Zhongyi, a senior research fellow at the Research Center for Rural Economy under the Ministry of Agriculture. He said that this scheme inspired designers of other social security systems, such as urban resident medical scheme and rural pension plans, and laid a solid foundation for the building of an all-inclusive basic medical insurance system in China.

The Chinese Government in April 2009 unveiled an 850-billion-yuan ($136 billion) three-year program for health care reform. With the funds, the government promised universal access to basic health insurance, the introduction of an essential medicines system, improved community-level health care facilities, equitable access to basic public health services and pilot reforms of public hospitals.

According to a white paper on medical and health services in China issued by the Information Office of the State Council last December, the Chinese population’s general health conditions have been ranked the best among developing countries. The report said that from 2002 to 2011 the country’s maternal mortality rate went down from 51.3 to 26.1 per 100,000, the infant mortality rate dropped from 29.2 to 12.1 per 1,000, and the mortality rate of children under the age of 5 dropped from 34.9 to 15.6 per 1,000.

A pioneering reform

“At the beginning, I was driven more by determination and courage than confidence in pushing forward the health care reform,” said Vice Premier Li Keqiang at a conference last April. At the beginning of his speech, he recalled his anxiety when presiding over the conference to kickstart the reform three years ago.

Li was entrusted with the daunting task of designing and promoting a health care reform program with the largest number of beneficiaries ever in 2008. On October 14 of the same year, a draft reform plan was publicized to solicit public opinions, which drew around 36,000 suggestions and comments from across the country within just one month.

“Health care reform is no easy task for any country, especially one with 1.3 billion people,” said Minister of Health Chen Zhu.

Between 2009 and 2012, the Central Government issued 14 documents on health care reform and more than 50 supplementary documents were issued by various government departments, which have formed a policy framework. China’s achievement of universal coverage of basic medical insurance has been spoken highly of by the international community.

“China’s health reform process, solutions and lessons will provide evidence to inform debate and, ultimately, enhance global health care outcomes,” wrote an editorial on China’s health system published by renowned medical journal Lancet in March 2012.

(source: www.bjreview.com.cn)

 

Other countries have done better at dragging health care into the information revolution, report RAND analysts Art Kellermann and Spencer Jones

By Art Kellermann and Spencer Jones

Because information technology has so quickly transformed people’s daily lives, we tend to forget how much things have changed from the not-so-distant past. Today, millions of people around the world regularly shop online; download entire movies, books and other media onto wireless devices; bank at ATMs wherever they choose; and self-book travel while checking themselves in at airports electronically.

But there is one sector of our lives where adoption of information technology has lagged conspicuously: health care.

Some parts of the world are doing better than others in this respect. Researchers from the Commonwealth Fund recently reported that some high-income countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, have made great strides in the use of electronic medical records among primary-care physicians. Indeed, in those countries, the practice is now nearly universal.

Yet some other high-income countries, such as the United States and Canada, are not keeping up. Usage of electronic medical records in America, the home of Apple and Google, stands at only 69 percent — and most of them have little to do with patient care.

The situation in the United States is particularly glaring, given that health care accounts for a bigger share of GDP than manufacturing, retail, finance or insurance. Moreover, most health IT systems in America today are designed primarily to facilitate efficient billing, rather than efficient care, putting the business interests of hospitals and clinics ahead of the needs of doctors and patients. That is why many Americans can easily go online and check the health of their bank account but cannot check the results of their most recent lab work.

Another difference between IT in U.S. health care and other industries is “interoperability.” A hospital’s IT system, for instance, often cannot “talk” to others. Even hospitals that are part of the same system sometimes struggle to share patient information.

As a result, today’s health IT systems act more like a frequent-flyer card designed to enforce customer loyalty to a particular hospital rather than an ATM-type card that could enable you and your doctor to access your health information whenever and wherever needed. Ordinarily, lack of interoperability is an irritating inconvenience. In a medical emergency, it can impose life-threatening delays in care.

A third way that health IT in America differs from consumer IT is usability. The design of most consumer websites is so obvious that one needs no instructions to use them. Within minutes, a 7-year-old can teach herself to play a complex game on an iPad.

But a newly hired neurosurgeon with 27 years of education may have to read a thick user manual, attend tedious classes and accept periodic tutoring from a “change champion” to master his hospital’s IT system. Not surprisingly, despite its theoretical benefits, health IT has few fans among health care providers. In fact, many complain that it slows them down.

Does this mean that health IT is a waste of time and money?

Absolutely not. In 2005, colleagues of ours at the RAND Corp. projected that America could save more than $80 billion a year if health care could replicate the IT-driven productivity gains observed in other industries. The fact that the United States has not gotten there yet is not a problem of vision but of implementation.

Other industries, including banking and retail trade, struggled with IT until they got it right. The gap between what IT promised and what it delivered in the early days was so stark that experts called it the “IT productivity paradox.” Once these industries figured out how to make their IT systems more efficient, interoperable and user-friendly, and then realigned their processes to leverage technology’s capabilities, productivity soared.

In America, as in much of the world, health care is late to the IT game, and is experiencing these growing pains only now. But health care providers can shorten the transformation by learning from other industries.

The U.S. government is trying to help. In 2009, Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. HITECH has undeniably accelerated IT adoption, yet the problems of usability and interoperability persist.

Globally, the health IT industry should not wait to be forced by government regulators into doing a better job. Developers can boost the pace of adoption by creating more standardized systems that are easier to use, truly interoperable and that afford patients greater access to and control over their personal health data. Health care providers and hospital systems can dramatically boost the impact of health IT by re-engineering traditional practices to take full advantage of its capabilities.

The sky is the limit when it comes to potential gains from health IT. According to the Institute of Medicine, the United States wastes more than $750 billion per year on unnecessary or inefficient health care services, excessive administrative costs, high prices, medical fraud and missed opportunities for prevention. Health IT can improve health care in all of these dimensions.

The payoff will be worth it. Indeed, as with the adoption of IT elsewhere, we may soon wonder how health care could have been delivered any other way.

(source: www.post-gazette.com)

Local Health Authorities in collaboration with the World health Organization (WHO) are working closely on strategic plans to prevent any increase of dengue fever in the country.

The Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS) earlier this week has recorded up to 223 suspected cases in Honiara alone.

The increase has forced health authorities to issue a dengue alert calling on members of the public to keep their homes and surroundings clean to destroy mosquito breeding sites.

World Health Organization (WHO) consultant entomologist Dr Chang Moh Seng said the public must alerted on this outbreak.

Dr Seng said the mosquito that carries dengue virus (Aedes) normally bites late afternoon and early in the mornings.

“The virus can only be controlled if communities agreed to working together to remove or clean up breeding sites and apply insecticides where they breed,” Dr Seng said.

Meanwhile, the Head of Surveillance Unit in the Ministry of Health and Medical Services Alison Sio said they are working closely with WHO on strategic plans to curb the increase of dengue cases.

The Ministry is sending staff to Malaita and Western provinces this week to check on the situations there.

The cases recorded so far are only for Honiara where surveillance has been carried out.

(source: www.scoop.co.nz)

Lately, I’ve been disturbed and concerned with the news about a newborn baby who died due to respiratory problems after eight hospitals in Jakarta allegedly refused to treat the child.

According to Indonesia’s Health Minister Nafsiah Mboi, the death of Dera Nur Anggraini was not caused by the lack of attention given by the hospital staff, but it was because the baby was born prematurely — she was even less than one kilogram in weight and her lungs hadn’t been fully developed.

Causes of premature birth are still generally unknown, and only 25 percent of premature babies survive. To treat a premature born baby requires doctors’ expertise, expensive medical machinery and a whole lot of money.

It is such a tragedy for the family to lose a newborn baby. Hospitals claim that they do not discriminate the patient’s social status and treat all patients equally.

However, no matter how fairly they try to treat the patients, there is still a very limited number of specialist equipment for some serious medical conditions. Unfortunately, not everyone gets to use it. Ever since the Kartu Sehat Jakarta (Jakarta Health Card) were given out, the number of patients queuing for free health care has increased significantly.

Moreover, we haven’t been implementing the right system for the patients. Many confused and desperate patients show up to hospitals which either don’t have the right facilities — or not enough rooms —and they don’t know where to go to find help.

Deputy Governor Basuki Tjahja Purnama suggested that there should be a system where hospitals should be able to contact each other regarding available facilities, expertise or rooms to serve the patients, so that they could transfer patients to a more suitable hospital. This could save so much time for patients who are in urgent need of medical care.

Perhaps both local and central government should investigate which diseases, medical conditions and hospital management issues that need to be handled urgently. After this process, scholarships should be provided for medical students to do more work and research on those medical conditions and management issues in order to increase the amount of expertise in Indonesia.

It’s time to prepare Jakarta for better health care to prevent tragedies. Better service, better expertise and better equipment.

(source: www.thejakartaglobe.com)

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that will ban smoking in most public places and restrict cigarette sales in the world’s second-largest tobacco market after China.

The law will ban smoking in some public places such as subways and schools from June 1, and come into force a year later in other places including restaurants and cafes.

It will also ban sales of tobacco products at street kiosks from June 1, 2014, restrict advertising and set minimum prices for cigarettes which now cost 50 to 60 roubles a pack (less than $2).

Putin, who started a new six-year term in 2012 and has promoted healthy lifestyles, hopes the law will help undermine an entrenched cigarette culture and reverse a decline in Russia’s population since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Advocating the law in a video blog before it was submitted to parliament last year, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said nearly one in three Russians were hooked on smoking, and almost 400,000 die each year from smoking-related causes.

The Kremlin said Putin had signed the law on Saturday but did not announce it until Monday. It said the law was intended to bring Russia into line with a World Health Organization tobacco control treaty that Moscow ratified in 2008.

The law faced opposition from foreign tobacco companies that dominate a cigarette market estimated to be worth $22 billion in 2011 by Euromonitor International, a market research company.

Russia’s population fell from 148.6 million in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, to 141.9 million in 2011, according to World Bank figures.

(source: thestar.com.my)

PETALING JAYA: The Health Ministry is considering providing incentives to encourage the private sector to set up community pharmacies in rural areas.

Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said such incentives was necessary to overcome a shortage of pharmacies in rural areas.

“The Ministry views the situation (lack of pharmacies in rural areas) seriously as many such pharmacies are only mushrooming in the city and concentrated in certain regions,” he told reporters after opening the 100th Cosway Pharmacy outlet in Damansara, near here, on Sunday.

Liow in his speech text that was read by the Health Ministry’s Pharmaceutical services division senior director Datuk Eisah A Rahman, said according to the ministry’s statistics, there were 10,006 registered pharmacies and 1,834 community pharmacies throughout the country.

The concentration of community pharmacies is in Selangor (where there are 433 pharmacies), Penang (213), Kuala Lumpur (201) and Johor (157).

Realising the lack of pharmacies in rural areas and the inequitable distribution, the Health Ministry was looking into a zoning system to distribute pharmacies accordingly in urban and rural areas so that the people would not be deprived of such facilities, Liow said.

To ensure an equitable distribution of pharmacies in the country, the ministry and the Malaysian Pharmacy Association had developed the Malaysian Healthcare Providers Mapping Service.

Currently, the ratio of pharmacists to the population in Malaysia is 1:2,947 people and by 2016 it is expected to reach the optimum ratio of 1:2,000 people set by the World Health Organisation.

(source: thestar.com.my)

A newly identified virus that comes from the same family as SARS has many worried that the world could be facing a threatening new pandemic. But it’s still unclear how much of a danger this new virus presents.

The virus has been dubbed EMC, after the Erasmus Medical Centre where it was first identified, or sometimes just NCoV, for “novel coronavirus.”

It was first identified in September, when the World Health Organization issued an international alert saying a completely new virus had infected a Qatari man from Britain who had recently travelled to Saudi Arabia.

Since then, 12 cases have been identified, including a cluster of cases reported last week in a British family.

While there have so far been only a handful of known cases, half of those have resulted in death. That’s led many to worry about how virulent this new virus might be.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) encouraged countries around the world to keep a close eye on any cases of acute respiratory infections within their borders, asking them to carefully review any unusual patterns.

Specifically, the global health body suggested testing for the new coronavirus should be considered in patients with unexplained pneumonias, as well as those with unexplained or complicated respiratory illness who aren’t responding to treatment.

The new coronavirus appears to cause severe pneumonia and sometimes kidney failure. While most of the cases have been related to travel to the Middle East, two family members of a man who just died in Britain appeared to pick up their infections through person-to-person contact.

That’s why health officials around the world are tracking the virus carefully, trying to understand how it spreads and how dangerous it is.

On Wednesday, the Public Health Agency of Canada said it “continues to monitor the situation” and any suspect cases will be sent to the National Microbiology Laboratory for examination.

However, the agency warned that “the risk to Canadians is low.

“Evidence suggests that the novel coronavirus is not efficiently transmissible between humans and has greater effects on people with pre-existing medical conditions,” the agency said in an email statement to CTV News, noting that the number of worldwide cases has been “very limited” since it was first detected.

On Tuesday, European scientists revealed the new virus easily infects the cells of the airways of the human lung. In fact, the virus is as adept at infecting the cells of the upper airways as the one that caused SARS and one that causes common colds – which are also from the coronavirus family.

At this point, though, it’s still not known how easily it spreads and how virulently it causes illness.

“What we need to be watching for are any signs that this virus gains the ability to transmit efficiently from human to human,” the WHO’s Gregory Hartl told reporters this week. “So far, we have seen no signs of efficient transmission in humans.”

So far, it seems, the virus does not cause illness very easily, and that has infectious diseases experts, such as Dr. Neil Rau, reassured.

“I don’t think it is a big cause for concern at this stage,” he told CTV News. “…I think we need a lot more info on whether this is a rarely encountered virus that often kills, or quite widespread but rarely can kill people.”

Rau says there is a lot of interest in this virus because it comes from the same family as SARS. But so far it doesn’t appear to be anything like SARS, which affected more than 8,000 patients within months of its emergence in China and caused more than 700 deaths.

“I think the great deal of interest in this virus is that it is from the same family as the SARS virus but the overall pattern of disease is very, very different and very, very reassuring,” Rau said.

Volker Thiel, one of the immunobiologists who released this week’s research, says he was surprised at how easily the virus could infect cells. But he cautioned that doesn’t mean the virus can easily pass from person to person.

“We have shown that the airway cells can easily be infected. But this does not mean that the virus can easily be transmitted,” he told The Canadian Press. “I think this distinction is important.”

(source: www.ctvnews.ca)

A group of experts recently participated in a workshop organized by the World Health Organization and the Stop TB Partnership to propose goals to guide the world’s fight against tuberculosis after 2015.

Thirty-one experts participated in the meeting including modeling experts, epidemiologists, civil society advocates, research and development entities, development and technical agencies, and representatives from high burden tuberculosis countries. The group shared the aspirational goal of zero TB deaths, zero TB disease and zero suffering.

The experts broadly agreed on a set of interim targets for 2025, including the reduction of TB deaths by 75 percent by 2025 compared with 2015. The achievement of the goal would drop worldwide TB deaths from a projected 1.2 million in 2015 to 300,000 in 2025.

A closely related second goal is the reduction of the TB incidence rate by 40 percent by 2025 when compared to 2015. A third goal was related to universal health coverage, a potential prominent feature in the broad post-2015 development agency.

To achieve the proposed interim targets, the experts said that a dramatic scale up of TB diagnosis and treatment will be required, in addition to further universal health coverage advancement, poverty reduction, economic development, substantial research and development research, and widespread uptake of new tools.

The participants agreed that even bolder targets should be created for 2030 and 2040.

The World Health Assembly will discuss the new TB elimination strategy and targets in 2014, which will be at the core of the next global TB elimination plan by the Stop TB Partnership.

(source: vaccinenewsdaily.com)