Millions of lives are in danger due to the interruption of the United States international aid for the fight against tuberculosis, especially in low -income countries that almost depended completely on it to combat one of the most lethal infectious diseases, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday.
The financing cuts, one of the effects of the blockade of a good part of the activities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), “will have a devastating impact,” said a statement from the United Nations Health Agency, from which the US Government came out in January.
The WHO recalled that the US government has supplied annually between 200 and 250 million dollars for these programs, which represented a quarter of the total state of state donations.
The interruption of the aid, the WHO stressed, puts in particular risk 18 countries in the most affected regions (Africa, Southeast Asia and Oriental-Pacific Asia), which depended in 89% of US aid.
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Thirty countries have already confirmed that the end of these grants has dismantled essential services against tuberculosis, leaving thousands of health workers at risk of losing their job.
“The medication supply chains are breaking due to the suspensions in the templates, the lack of funds and the data access problems,” said WHO, which also denounced the cuts that affect laboratories and the arrest of numerous clinical test programs, which could stop the progress in the investigation against the disease.
WHO recalls that prevention programs, tests and treatments against tuberculosis have saved about 79 million lives in the last 20 years, and recognizes that much of the progress “has been promoted by foreign aid to developing countries, particularly USAID.”
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Although WHO does not launch forecasts on the lives that could be lost to the cuts, remember that during the Covid-19 Pandemia the interruptions of tuberculosis care services caused an excess in the number of average deaths of about 700,000 people between 2020 and 2023
With EFE information
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