The world is still not completely out of the grip of the Covid-19 virus and countries like China are still fighting a battle with the health emergency. During the fight against Covid, other health challenges somewhere took a backseat and on Wednesday the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus informed that the progress against HIV, Malaria, and TB has stalled or gone backward.
Health experts were long warned about the Covid-19 pandemic derailing the efforts to deal with other serious health complications.
The comment from the head of the world health body confirms what many health research organizations like Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria were claiming. According to the organization, the spread of HIV, TB and Malaria is rising especially in low-income Asian and African countries.
“HIV prevention has been knocked backward. With the dramatic drop in case management for malaria, we face a real risk of a spike in mortality. Much of the progress we’ve made to close the gap in finding “missing” people with TB have been reversed. The stark truth is that we will see more incremental deaths from HIV, TB, and malaria in 2021 as a consequence of the disruption caused by COVID-19 in 2020,” said Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund.
According to the study, the tests for diagnosing HIV fell by 41% while there were 59% reductions in the cases of TB referrals (patients with suspected TB were referred for the next stage of diagnosis and treatment).
Here again, the role of Covid-19 surfaces as the pathological labs were also suffering with the shortage of testing and PPE kits which became a hurdle in the smooth testing procedure.
“In most low- and middle-income countries, the crisis is far from over, with infections and deaths from COVID-19 continuing to increase, and the knock-on impact on HIV, TB, and malaria continuing to escalate,” Peter added.
