Usually poor. Generally living in the slums or countryside. Busy just trying to stay alive. People who suffer tuberculosis struggle to be seen, let alone treated.
On behalf of them, today Dr. Paul Farmer, a founder of Partners In Health, and Dr. Joanne Liu, the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, published a jointly written op-ed in Project Syndicate, a Czech-based organization that offers free news commentary to some 500 media outlets around the world.
Farmer and Liu call on the world to imagine TB not as some Victorian disease, one of sanatoriums and “consumption,” but as what it currently is, the world’s most deadly infectious disease, responsible for the death of roughly two million people annually. They urge drug companies to develop more and better treatments. They implore “a broad coalition” to “rush to the aid of these patients.” And they lament the global indifference that has made them leaders in the fight.
“It is a sorry situation when nongovernmental organizations, rather than governments, academic institutions, and drug companies, must push for the use of available new drugs,” they write.