Meet The World’s Top Infectious Killer- This Year’s G20 Summit Made This Discovery

Global health experts have repeatedly warned of the growing threat of drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis, which are responsible for around 580,000 cases annually. Typical cases of TB have a cure rate of over 90 percent, but MDR-TB cases have a cure rate of around 50 percent.

Advocates in the fight against tuberculosis are pleased that the top global infectious killer is mentioned by name in this year’s G-20 Leaders’ Declaration.

“The specific inclusion of TB on top of the priority pathogens listed by World Health Organization to be addressed by new efforts in R&D against [antimicrobial resistance] is a great victory of the TB community against many odds,” Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of WHO’s Global TB Programme, told HuffPost in an email.

We get almost 2 million deaths, 11 million cases a year in a disease that we can diagnose, treat and cure. The world needs to be outraged more than it is.Dr. Eric Goosby, United Nations special envoy on tuberculosis

By 2050, drug-resistant forms of the airborne disease are expected to account for a quarter of the 10 million deaths due to AMR each year, according to the final report of the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, a U.K. committee chaired by the economist Jim O’Neill. More than 75 million people are expected to die of multidrug-resistant TB by 2050.

Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the international Stop TB Partnership, was thrilled that tuberculosis made the final draft of the leaders’ declaration.

“I think we are going to a place we’ve never been,” she said of the momentum in the fight against TB. “This is the first time that it’s come up at this level of heads of state.”