Tuberculosis has regained its position as the deadliest infectious disease in the world. The world health organisation has found 1.25 million people died from the bacterial infection last year.
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00:00Tuberculosis, or TB, is a highly infectious disease caused by a bacteria.
00:09And we know that globally TB has, even before COVID, was one of the biggest killer or infectious
00:15diseases killer.
00:17And most of the burden that we see is in low and middle income country.
00:22It's a disease of poverty.
00:23It's often associated with poor living conditions or social conditions.
00:28And so often we see very high burdens in low and middle income country, including many
00:32countries in our region, such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, where we see a
00:37lot of high burden of tuberculosis, but also we see the disease affect people living in
00:43Australia as well.
00:45It's a preventable disease.
00:46It's also a curable disease, but ultimately there are lots of different complex factors
00:52that are at play.
00:53You can detect it, so there are really more and more advances being made in how the disease
00:59is detected and how it's treated.
01:01But there are a couple of big things.
01:02First, it's a disease of poverty, and because the way it spreads, it spreads when people
01:07are living in close contact settings.
01:09So unless some of those more, as we call them, social determinants of health are addressed,
01:14we're going to continue to face this challenge of TB transmission in many settings.
01:19But also from a, I guess, public health, medical perspective, we need to ensure that people
01:24who might be infected or are infected do have access to testing so they can get detected
01:28and be put on treatment.
01:30And the challenges with treatment as well is that it's treated by commonly used antibiotics,
01:36but it's long-term as well.
01:37So staying on that is also really important to have really good access to medical care
01:42as well.