Day: November 10, 2023

Global cases of tuberculosis — also known as TB — continued to rise last year as disruption to health services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic set back efforts to fight the disease, according to the latest report from the World Health Organization.

Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that usually attacks the lungs, is both preventable and curable. It caused an estimated 1.3 million deaths in 2022 — a 19% drop from the year before, said the annual WHO report published last week.

However, there was a small increase in the number of global TB cases to an estimated 10.6 million. Some 40% of people living with TB are undiagnosed and untreated.

The disease is just behind COVID-19 as the world’s deadliest infectious illness, with India, Indonesia and the Philippines particularly affected.

COVID disruption

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, saw health services overwhelmed in many parts of the world. TB diagnosis and treatment levels plummeted, said Dr. Lucica Ditiu, the executive director of the Geneva-based Stop TB Partnership.

“Unfortunately, the incidence of TB is growing. We used to have a decline of 2% per year. And then due to COVID, we have now an increase for the last two years — 2021 and 2022 — of almost 4%,” she told VOA.

The World Health Organization estimates COVID-related disruptions resulted in almost half a million excess deaths from TB in the three years from 2020 to 2022.

Childhood TB

The report also reveals a concerning lack of progress in some areas, according to Ditiu.

“We see … a pretty difficult situation for people with drug-resistant TB as well as childhood TB. So [with] drug-resistant TB, just short of 200,000 were diagnosed and put in treatment,” she said. “And exactly as the WHO said, two out of five people with drug-resistant TB had access to drug-resistant TB treatment. It’s actually the access to diagnosis which is limiting that.”

Ditiu said there are an estimated 1.3 million children with TB, about 12% of the world total. Children make up 16% of those who die from TB, she said.

Improved diagnosis

However, the focus on fighting tuberculosis appears to be getting back on track. The total number of cases diagnosed globally last year was 7.5 million, the highest ever recorded.

“This shows that the countries buckled up to recover after COVID – and even jump above the level before COVID,” Ditiu said.

Vaccine hopes

A promising TB vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline, known as M72, is currently in the final stage of trials. Sixteen other vaccines are undergoing earlier stages of testing.

“We need a vaccine. So that will be the game changer,” said Ditiu.

The 19% fall in deaths from TB from 2018 to 2022 is still far short of the World Health Organization’s target of a 75% reduction by 2025.

Funding also fell short, reaching less than half of the WHO target of at least $13 billion on TB diagnosis, treatment and prevention services in 2022.

Governments committed to spending $22 billion a year on TB by 2027 at a special U.N. meeting in September.
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The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration — NOAA — reports the U.S. has seen 25 separate weather or climate “disasters” — events causing damage or losses exceeding $1 billion — so far this year, the highest number since the agency began tracking such events 43 years ago.  

In a report issued this week, NOAA said severe thunderstorms moving through Oklahoma and other southern Plains states September 23 and 24 brought high winds and large hail, causing enough damage to rank as the 25th weather disaster so far in 2023. 

The agency said disasters through October of this year included 19 severe storms, two flooding events, a winter storm in the northeastern U.S., a drought and heat wave in the central and southern states, one wildfire (on Maui in August), and one tropical cyclone (Hurricane Idalia in Florida). 

NOAA said these events took the lives of 464 people and had a severe economic impact on the regions where they occurred. The total cost in damages from these events was more than $73 billion. The year-to-date tally exceeds 2020, which saw 19 disasters through October.  

NOAA reports the annual average number of such disaster events between 1980 and 2022 was 8.1 per year. The agency reports the annual average jumped in the most recent five years (2018-2022) to 18 disasters per year. 

Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 373 separate weather and climate events resulting in overall damages or costs reaching or exceeding $1 billion, according to NOAA. The total cost of these 373 events exceeds $2.645 trillion. 
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Warmer ocean temperatures are hurting coral reefs off the U.S. state of Florida. For VOA, Genia Dulot took a look at what’s happening underwater.
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Internet access across the war-torn nation of Yemen collapsed Friday and stayed down for hours, with officials later blaming unannounced “maintenance work” for an outage that followed attacks by the country’s Houthi rebels on both Israel and the U.S.

The outage began early Friday and halted all traffic at YemenNet, the country’s main provider for about 10 million users which is now controlled by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis.

Both NetBlocks, a group tracking internet outages, and the internet services company CloudFlare reported the outage. The two did not offer a cause for the outage.

“Data shows that the issue has impacted connectivity at a national level as well,” CloudFlare said.

Several hours later, some service was restored, though access remained troubled.

In a statement to the Houthi-controlled SABA state news agency, Yemen’s Public Telecom Corp. blamed the outage on maintenance.

“Internet service will return after the completion of the maintenance work,” the statement quoted an unidentified official as saying.

An earlier outage occurred in January 2022 when the Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis in Yemen bombed a telecommunications building in the Red City port city of Hodeida. There was no immediate word of a similar attack.

The undersea FALCON cable carries the internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. The FALCON cable has another landing in Yemen’s far eastern port of Ghaydah as well, but the majority of Yemen’s population lives in its west along the Red Sea.

GCX, the company that operates the cable, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

The outage came after a series of recent drone and missile attacks by the Houthis targeting Israel during its campaign of airstrikes and a ground offensive targeting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That includes a claimed strike Thursday targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat on the Red Sea. The Houthis also shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone this week with a surface-to-air missile, part of a wide series of attacks in the Mideast raising concerns about a regional war breaking out.

Yemen’s conflict began in 2014 when the Houthis seized Sanaa and much of the country’s north. The internationally recognized government fled to the south and then into exile in Saudi Arabia.

The Houthi takeover prompted a Saudi-led coalition to intervene months later and the conflict turned into a regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the U.S. long involved on the periphery, providing intelligence assistance to the kingdom.

However, international criticism over Saudi airstrikes killing civilians saw the U.S. pull back its support. The U.S. is suspected of still carrying out drone strikes targeting suspected members of Yemen’s local al-Qaida branch.

The war has killed more than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, killing tens of thousands more. A cease-fire that expired last October largely has held in the time since, though the Houthis are believed to be slowly stepping up their attacks as a permanent peace has yet to be reached.
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Rain in New Delhi and its suburbs brought relief Friday morning to the Indian capital, where authorities were mulling seeding clouds to improve the toxic air gripping the city.

New Delhi, which was the most polluted in the world until Thursday, saw its air quality index (AQI) improve to 127 early Friday – a welcome change from the “hazardous” 400-500 level seen during the past week, according to the Swiss group IQAir.

India’s weather department has forecast intermittent rain over the city and adjoining areas until early noon on Friday. Light showers are also expected in neighboring states like Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan.

On Friday morning, New Delhi was the 10th most polluted city in the world, while Kolkata, in India’s east, topped the global chart with an AQI of 303.

Meanwhile, air in the financial capital of Mumbai has markedly improved due to showers in nearby coastal areas.

This year, attention on the worsening air quality has cast a shadow over the cricket World Cup hosted by India.

Scientists and authorities were planning to seed clouds in New Delhi around Nov. 20 to trigger heavy rain, the first such attempt to clean the air.

A thick layer of smog envelops the city every year ahead of winter as heavy, cold air traps dust, vehicle emissions and smoke from burning crop stubble in Punjab and Haryana.

Friday’s rain comes two days before the Diwali festival, when many people defy a ban on firecrackers, causing a spike in air pollution.

The local government of the city of 20 million people, spread over roughly 1,500 square kilometers, has already closed all schools, stopped construction activities, and said it will impose restrictions on vehicle use to control pollution.
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