Several epidemiologists yesterday urged the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) to work together to combat diabetes and tuberculosis after a recent local study found a link between the spread of the two diseases.
A study by a team of researchers from National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health found that halting the rise in diabetes can reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis in countries that have a high rate of tuberculosis.
The team used dynamic tuberculosis transmission models to analyze the potential effect of diabetes on tuberculosis epidemiology in 11 Asian countries that have a high rate of tuberculosis as well as Brazil and Russia. The results of the study were published in the online version of The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology on March 5.
“The 13 countries accounted for 60 percent of tuberculosis cases worldwide cases, which affected 9 million people and killed 1.5 million around the globe last year,” Pan Sung-ching (盤松青), one of the study authors and an attending physician at National Taiwan University Hospital’s internal medicine department, told a news conference in Taipei.
Pan, a doctoral candidate at the college’s Institute of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, said while there is growing evidence linking diabetes with an increased risk of tuberculosis infection and mortality, little effort has been devoted to exploring the potential impact of the growing global prevalence of diabetes on tuberculosis prevention and transmission.
“We found that if the diabetes incidence rate continues to increase at its current pace, the prevalence of tuberculosis would only drop by 8.8 percent by 2035, far below the WHO’s global tuberculosis target of a 90 percent reduction,” Pan said.
However, the researchers discovered that halting the increase in diabetes prevalence could prevent 6 million new tuberculosis cases and 1.1 million deaths in the next two decades, while a 35 percent drop in diabetes incidence rate — due to aggressive prevention measures — could avert 7.8 million new cases of tuberculosis and 1.5 million deaths, Pan said.
Lin Hsien-ho (林先和), an associate professor at the institute, said the incidence rate of tuberculosis in Taiwan is currently about 50 people per 100,000 population.
“Only about 10 to 20 percent of people infected with tuberculosis will actually develop the disease. However, research shows that diabetics are 3.1 times more likely to develop an active disease, face a 1.9 times greater risk of dying from tuberculosis and are 3.9 times more susceptible to relapse than their non-diabetic counterparts,” Lin said.
While the Health Promotion Administration monitors diabetics because diabetes is a non-contagious disease, tuberculosis cases are managed by the CDC, with the two agencies keeping seperate statistics, Lin said.
He said he had repeatedly raised the need for interagency cooperation with the two diseases in meetings with the CDC, and it gradually came to realize the severity of the problem. The CDC now compares reported cases of tuberculosis with the Health Promotion Administration’s data on diabetes in the hope of being better able to curb the prevalence of both diseases, he said.
“The two agencies’ cooperation will be vital in the nation’s battle against tuberculosis,” he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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