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Mozambique and Angola among top 20 tuberculosis countries
2:16 CAT | 17 Oct 2016
DW (File photo)
Mozambique and Angola are among the 20 countries with the highest incidence of tuberculosis in the world, with each estimated to have registered more than 80,000 new cases in 2015, a World Health Organization (WHO) report reveals.
The global report on tuberculosis, published Thursday 14 October by the WHO estimates 2015 saw 10.4 million new cases of tuberculosis in the world and warns that, although the incidence and mortality are falling, countries need to gear up to eliminate the disease.
Based on data collected from 202 countries and territories representing over 99% of world population and global TB cases, the report highlights the 20 countries with the highest absolute number of new cases, to which it adds the ten countries with the highest proportion of new cases in the population.
Among the top 20 come Mozambique, with 154,000 new cases in 2015, and Angola, with 93,000 new cases.
The incidence rate – the number of new cases in relation to the size of the population – varies widely between countries, ranging from less than 10 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants to more than 500.
Mozambique with 551 new cases per 100 thousand inhabitants
On this metric, Mozambique comes in with 551 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants, a rate surpassed only by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), with 561 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants, Lesotho with 788 and South Africa with 834.
The report cross-references the list of 30 countries with the highest incidence of tuberculosis with two other lists: the 30 countries with new cases of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and the 30 countries with new cases of HIV-associated tuberculosis.
There are 48 countries that are in at least one of the three lists and 14 countries that appear on all three lists, two of which are Portuguese-speaking: Mozambique and Angola.
Brazil is in two lists – high incidence of tuberculosis and high incidence associated with HIV – and Guinea-Bissau, another Portuguese-speaking country, appears only in the list of countries with tuberculosis linked to HIV.
Guinea-Bissau with new cases of HIV
The WHO estimates that Guinea-Bissau registered 6,600 new cases of tuberculosis in 2015 (369 per 100 thousand inhabitants), of which 40 percent (2,900) were HIV-positive.
In total, about a thousand sero-negative people and 1,500 sero-positive people died in Guinea-Bissau in 2015 from tuberculosis, mortality rates of 63 and 81 people per 100,000 inhabitants respectively.
Angola
In Angola, it is estimated that 93,000 new cases of TB occurred in 2015 (a rate of 370 for every 100 thousand), of which 28,000 were HIV-positive (30 percent) and 4,100 were cases of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. In the same year 11,000 HIV negative people (45 per 100 thousand inhabitants) and 7.2 HIV-positive (29 per 100 thousand inhabitants) died of tuberculosis.
Brazil will have registered 84,000 new cases of TB in 2015: 52,000 men, 24,000 women and 8,000 children, with an incidence rate of 41 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants. Of these 13 thousand (15 percent) were HIV positive.
Mozambique had an estimated 154,000 new cases of tuberculosis in 2015, of which 83,000 were men, 56,000 women and 15,000 children under 15 years. More than half of the new cases (52 percent) were people infected with HIV.
These figures are equivalent to an incidence rate of 551 to 100 000, one of the highest in the world.
34,000 people died in 2015 with HIV in Mozambique
In 2015, 21,000 HIV-negative and 34,000 HIV-positive people died of TB in Mozambique. WHO warns, however, that the estimated figures do not necessarily correspond to reported cases. Of the 10.4 million estimated new cases, only 6.1 million were detected and officially reported in 2015, representing a difference of 4.3 million.
This difference reflects a mixture of under-reporting of detected cases (especially in countries with large private sectors) and under-diagnosis (especially in countries with difficult access to health services).
Ten countries, including Mozambique, represent 77 percent of the total difference between notifications and estimates.
Source: Deutsche Welle
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