Submitted by Dr T. Dougan on Fri, 21/09/2018 - 16:27
Active infections kill 4,000 people a day worldwide, more than AIDS does. But the notion that a quarter of the global population harbors silent tuberculosis is “a fundamental misunderstanding.”
Although experts frequently assert that nearly 1.7 billion people carry dormant tuberculosis worldwide, that figure may be a “gross exaggeration” of the real threat, a recent study concludes.
The study, published last month in the journal BMJ, found that nearly everyone who falls seriously ill with TB does so within two years of getting infected. So-called latent infections only rarely become active, even in old age.
Researchers “have spent hundreds of millions of dollars chasing after latency, but the whole idea that a quarter of the world is infected with TB is based on a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Dr. Lalita Ramakrishnan, a tuberculosis expert at the University of Cambridge and one of the study’s authors.
