Extract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is likely to be the defining global health crisis of our generation. As the United Nations Development Programme highlighted in their recent call to action, the impact of this pandemic will extend beyond the immediate medical consequences to have far-reaching and long-lasting social and economic impacts, threatening to disproportionately affect poorer people in poorer countries [1]. Income losses are anticipated to exceed USD 220 billion in developing countries, where many people live day-to-day without access to social protection, and food security is precarious [1]. Strikingly, a recent United Nations study suggested that the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic could increase the number of people living in poverty by as much as half a billion, with the majority of these newly poor people living in Africa, South-East Asia, and Central and South America [2].
Abstract
The global health community must learn from COVID-19 and take action now on tuberculosis and its social determinants, potentially saving millions from a preventable and curable disease https://bit.ly/2LLgLgA
Footnotes
Support statement: M.J. Saunders and C.A. Evans acknowledge funding from: The Wellcome Trust (awards 057434/Z/99/Z, 070005/Z/02/Z, 078340/Z/05/Z, 105788/Z/14/Z and 201251/Z/16/Z); DFID-CSCF; the Joint Global Health Trials consortium (MRC, DFID, and Wellcome Trust award MR/K007467/1); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (award OPP1118545); the Sir Halley Stewart Trust; the World Health Organization; the STOP TB partnership's TB REACH initiative funded by the Government of Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (W5_PER_CDT1_PRISMA); and the charity IFHAD: Innovation For Health And Development. None of these organisations had any role in or placed any restrictions on the preparation or publication of this manuscript. This manuscript represents the opinion of the authors and not of any of these funding organisations.
Conflict of interest: M.J. Saunders has nothing to disclose.
Conflict of interest: C.A. Evans has nothing to disclose.
- Received April 23, 2020.
- Accepted May 13, 2020.
- Copyright ©ERS 2020
This version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence 4.0.