Tuberculosis Now Deadlier Than COVID, Doctors Warn

KARACHI: Medical experts have delivered a stark verdict: tuberculosis, not COVID-19, now ranks as the more dangerous disease facing the world. The warnings were delivered at the APAC-IRIDS Conference held in Bangkok, Thailand, by some of the world's foremost infectious disease experts who met there to analyze why this disease, which was believed to have been under control in most countries, is still outgrowing medical science.

At the heart of the matter, say the experts, is climate change. The rising temperature of our planet is not only causing the melting of glaciers and breaking of heat records. They're making disease-causing germs hardier. That leaves health systems fighting two battles at once newer, climate-driven illnesses on one side, older diseases like tuberculosis that refuse to disappear on the other.

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Doctors from across Asia and beyond took the stage in Bangkok to make their case. Dr. Kaneez Fatima represented Pakistan. Dr. Subramanian Swaminathan came from India, Dr. Erlina Burhan from Indonesia, Dr. Rogaya W. Kalapes from the Philippines. Roche director Sergio Carmona rounded out the panel each of them has spent years working directly on TB containment and elimination programs.

Their message carried an unusual urgency. Controlling tuberculosis is no longer the goal, the doctors argued. Eliminating it is.

Here's what makes TB so stubborn: it moves quietly. The bacteria pass from person to person with almost no warning signs. A patient can carry the infection for months, sometimes longer, before anything shows up. They keep working, keep living normally, keep passing it on and nobody, including them, knows it's happening until a diagnosis finally catches up. COVID-19 announced itself within days through fever and cough. TB doesn't. That gap is the whole problem, according to the doctors in Bangkok.

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Pakistan knows this gap better than most countries. It's been listed among the world's highest TB-burden nations for years now, which is exactly why the warnings from Bangkok hit differently for the Pakistani doctors in the room.

There wasn't a single breakthrough announcement at this conference no new drug, no new vaccine data. What came out of it instead was blunter than that: a shared frustration among some of the field's most senior voices that TB has been managed, screened, medicated, and monitored for decades without anyone seriously pushing to finish the job. One expert put it plainly from the podium the disease still kills at a scale few other illnesses match, and it does that largely because it hides in plain sight for so long.

Nothing about the conference suggested this fight gets easier next year. If anything, the doctors' message pointed the other way: existing tools already work, they said, but they only work if governments actually use them at scale, rather than treating tuberculosis as background noise next to whatever outbreak is making headlines that week.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This is a health-related news topic; if you're personally concerned about TB exposure or symptoms, it's worth speaking with a doctor directly.