Tuberculosis is on the rise in England and people could be missing the warning signs, a new study suggests.
TB is the world’s top infection killer, killing 1.5 million people every year, despite being a preventable and curable disease.
The deadly infection, which mostly affects the lungs, is thought to be mainly spread through coughing. However, a new study suggests this is not the main route of transmission.
In fact, more than 80 percent of patients with TB do not experience a cough and it can be spread simply by breathing, scientists warn. This implies that the deadly bug is spreading unchecked through populations.
More than 80 percent of patients with tuberculosis not have a cough
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Research led by Amsterdam UMC and the Amsterdam Institute for Global Heath and Development analyzed data on more than 600,000 individuals in Africa and Asia and found that 82.8 percent of those with tuberculosis had no persistent cough and 62.5 percent had no cough at all. These results are published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
“Our results indicate the probable reason why, despite huge efforts to diagnose and treat the disease, the tuberculosis (TB) burden across Africa and Asia is hardly declining. We already knew that there was a giant gap between the 10.6 million who get ill with tuberculosis and the 7.5 million cases that were registered by health authorities in 2022,” said Frank Cobelens, Professor of Global Health at Amsterdam UMC and Senior Fellow at the AIGHD.
“A persistent cough is often the entry point for a diagnosis, but if 80 percent of those with TB don’t have one, then it means that a diagnosis will happen later, possibly after the infection has already been transmitted to many others, or not at all,” he added.
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