Another World Tuberculosis Day has come around today. This time, I’m out and about on college visits with my youngest kid, so I’m not lobbying about TB as I have for past World TB Days. But I am still thinking about it a lot because my local RESULTS group is working hard to rally U.S. support, as Congress is now facing funding decisions for global health programs and other budgeting plans.
The fight against tuberculosis is at a precarious point in 2023. TB cases and deaths have been on the rise ever since COVID-19 caused resources to be diverted for that new pandemic.
Tuberculosis is an ancient disease that has left its fingerprints all over world history. This World TB Day, I highly recommend reading a newly published book by Vidya Krishnan called The Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History. Krishnan is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on medical science for the last twenty years. She traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk-remedies, made way for scientific understanding of TB, so it could be controlled in the West.
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| Image: Cynthia & Yara holding copies of The Phantom Plague |
One of my kids, Yara Changyit-Levin, is now a college freshman enrolled in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Being global health advocates, we each have our own copies of The Phantom Plague. It shouldn't have surprised us when we both arrived at our spring break destination still reading and annotating our books. We both look forward to getting to the parts where real people we actually know, like Dr. Madhukar Pai at McGill University, played a significant part in the history of tuberculosis. It will help us see our own part in defeating this disease even though we still have an awful long way to go!
Want to learn more about what you personally can do to advocate in support of global TB programs? Visit this blog from RESULTS for an overview and actions.
To give you an example of what this advocacy can look like, here is my letter to the editor published last week in my local St. Louis Post-Dispatch Newspaper that thanks our area U.S. representatives for their actions to fight against TB:
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| Image: Clipping of my letter to the editor Photo credit: Greg Campbell |
“I applaud Congresswoman Ann Wagner for using her leadership to fight a deadly pandemic on the rise. Not COVID-19, but tuberculosis. Tuberculosis (TB) – an airborne disease – was the pandemic we were fighting long before coronavirus made news. It kills more people each year than HIV and malaria combined and has alternated with COVID-19 as the leading infectious disease killer over the past three years.
COVID-19 diverted global resources meant to fight TB. As a result, TB cases and deaths increased with 11 million sickened and 1.6 million killed worldwide in 2021. Representative Wagner recently co-authored a bi-partisan letter with Representative Ami Bera to the House appropriations committee recommending $1 billion for USAID bilateral tuberculosis funding in the FY24 spending bill to properly identify, treat, and prevent all forms of TB and develop new, more effective tools to fight it.
Happily, Congresswoman Cori Bush signed onto this letter, too. I’m grateful both of our St. Louis area U.S. representatives are engaged in this effort to support global health systems.”
I invite everyone to join in the fight against tuberculosis. Whether you make a couple of simple phone calls in honor of World TB Day, tweet about it, join a RESULTS group for a lobby meeting, or write a letter to the editor of your own, you can help us write the next chapter of world history and global health.
Image: Book cover
Buy an autographed copy of "From Changing Diapers to Changing the World: Why Moms Make Great Advocates and How to Get Started" at my website www.changyit.com or order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or any independent bookstore!
