World TB Day, falls on 24 March each year, a day designed to build public awareness that tuberculosis (TB) today remains an epidemic in much of the world.
TB is preventable and curable, yet it remains the world’s most common infectious disease killer. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10 million people fell ill from TB in 2017 and 1.6 million people died.
Only 64 percent of the estimated 10 million global cases of TB were actually diagnosed and notified.
Tuberculosis (TB) is the world’s leading infectious disease and it accounts for one in three deaths from HIV/AIDS, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2018 report on TB. This is why on World AIDS Day the Forum of International Respiratory Societies (FIRS), calls on governments, health advocates and non-government organisations to strengthen their response to AIDS and TB.
“AIDS and TB are a deadly combination,” said Polly Parsons, MD, President of American Thoracic Society, a FIRS founding member. “In the developing world, TB is often the first sign a person has HIV. Together, the diseases are far worse than they are alone.”
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a preventable and treatable disease that causes breathlessness, chronic sputum production and cough, there are 251 million current cases of COPD in the world. COPD is currently the 3rd leading cause of death globally and is highly prevalent in low resource countries. Exposure to tobacco smoke and other inhaled toxic particles and gases are the main risk factors for COPD, although recent research has identified that suboptimal lung growth before and after birth can also increase the risk of COPD later in life.
World COPD Day is an annual global initiative run by the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD), who are members of the Forum of International Respiratory Societies (FIRS).
An article published in the European Respiratory Journal found that a higher proportion of patients diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) lived in cities with higher levels of air pollutants. [1].
“We discovered that the majority of patients with HP in India, were living in urban cities, prompting an investigation into the link between ambient air pollution in urban India and the high incidence of HP,” Ganesh Raghu, MD, senior research author and Professor of Medicine and Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine. [2]
In support of World Pneumonia Day, 12 November, the Forum of International Respiratory Societies (FIRS) calls for renewed efforts to prevent and treat pneumonia.
Pneumonia is one of the most preventable and treatable illnesses in global health, yet every minute two children die from this illness, primarily because they are denied the benefits of prevention, accurate diagnosis and treatment.
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