While health officials announced the good news that there has been an 8.1 percent decline in new tuberculosis cases since 1996 (“New state cases of TB slow to statistical crawl,” Metro, March 25), this is not the time to become complacent about controlling TB.
The proportion of TB cases among the foreign-born continues to increase nationwide. Chicago and the rest of Illinois are particularly vulnerable to TB brought to the U.S. by immigrants–with Chicago among the top five cities to which immigrants come and Illinois among the top 10 states.
TB epidemics are worsening throughout the world, in Latin American, Africa, Eastern Europe, the newly independent states and the rest of Asia. At a time when more people travel aboard airplanes than ever, we cannot think of borders. TB does not recognize them.
As a first step, the U.S. must support other countries in their efforts to set up effective treatment programs using the World Health Organization’s strategy, Directly Observed Therapy Short-course (DOTS). Currently only about 15 percent of the world’s TB patients are being treated by DOTS programs. The rest receive no treatment or are being treated improperly and are likely to develop multidrug-resistant TB, which is particularly difficult and expensive to cure.
Over the long term, the National Institutes of Health must significantly expand its TB research activities with the goal of developing new diagnostics, drugs and, most important, a TB vaccine. A vaccine is our only hope for really controlling the disease in the future.
