Apr 4, 2014 – World TB day

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ANCHOR LEAD: WHAT IS THE STATE OF TUBERCULOSIS THIS WORLD TB DAY? ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS

World TB Day has just been recognized, with the prediction that 3 million people worldwide are infected with tuberculosis each year but aren’t diagnosed or treated. Just how big a problem is this for us here in the United States? Richard Chaisson, a Tuberculosis expert at Johns Hopkins, says, it’s a big problem.

CHAISSON: A great colleague of mine, George Comstock once said that TB anywhere is TB everywhere. Tuberculosis travels around the world. Most of the TB in this country now is imported. People who were born someplace where there’s a lot of TB move to the United States. Most of the TB that’s imported to this country is not in immigrants it’s in people who are visiting here. People travel around the world, we have to take that as a reality, and if we want to control TB in this country we have to
control it in the world. :30

Chaisson says cases of drug resistant TB are also occurring more frequently, most often because treatment isn’t completed, and this too, is everybody’s problem. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.