Big pie slice due for TB, Nader says
Death toll reaches 8,000 a day
In his State of the Union address, President Clinton earlier this year called for unprecedented increases in funding for the sciences. Thanks to strong Congressional support for the idea, funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now expected to rise at about 15% per year, doubling current levels by the year 2,005.
When it comes time to divvy up the pie, however, policy-makers in the capital need to pay closer attention to tuberculosis, says Ralph Nader, longtime consumer activist who has positioned himself as a strong advocate for more TB research.
"TB is not a little-known, newly emerging disease," says Nader. "It is an ancient marauder which kills three million people every year and 8,000 every day."
In his annual State of the Union address to the nation this past January, Clinton called for unprecedented increases in funding the sciences, including the biggest increases ever for the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and the National Cancer Institute.
In 1997, the NIH budget for TB research amounted to $65 million, a sum that represents the majority of the $80 million spent worldwide on TB research, Nader says.
By comparison, the budget for many other diseases is far greater: $2.3 billion a year for cancer, for example, and $1.5 billion for HIV/AIDS. "Since at least a third of AIDS patients ultimately die of TB, this disparity appears particularly inappropriate,"he says.
More money for TB is especially important now, he adds. Since the genetic code for the mycobacterium has been deciphered, researchers are at the threshold of many important discoveries about how the microbe works, Nader says.
The rise of resistant strains of TB also lends urgency to the need for more funding, he says. More than one-third of U.S. TB patients are now foreign-born, and some of the immigrants come from multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB "hot zones" such as the Dominican Republic, where one in seven people hold a travel visa to the United States.
"It takes only a few cases from an MDR-TB 'hot zone' for a very costly epidemic to take root in America," he adds.
When the cost for treating an epidemic of MDR-TB is weighed, "the prospective medical bill becomes frightening," Nader says. In new York City, more than $709 million was spent treating MDR-TB patients between 1992 and 1996. MDR-TB has been found in 34 countries worldwide; here in the United States, it has been reported in 42 states, he adds.
"TB is not just a public health issue, nor is it just a foreign aid issue," he says. "It is a non- partisan national security threat that demands a strong-willed research initiative."
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