Friday, October 23, 2009

World Rates

I recently noticed I am getting traffic from people in all parts of the world. For today's post, I think it would be a great idea to focus on regions and countries that have a high TB prevalence. By knowing if you live in a highly TB infected area, you can check to see if you have been exposed, and medicate or prevent if needed.

Below is a table of world regions and the TB incident rates from the World Health Sciences website (http://www.worldhealthsciences.com/). The table breaks information into particular world regions and the number and percentage of people exposed to TB.


World RegionNumber (in thousands)% of GlobalTotal TB Mortality Per 100,000 of Population
South East Asia
2,993
34%
31.0
Africa
2,529
29%
74.0
Western Pacific
1,927
22%
17.0
Eastern Mediterranean
565
6%
21.0
Europe
445
5%
7.4
The Americas
352
4%
5.5
Global
8,811
100%
24.0


Some of the most infected countries are below.
India
China
Indonesia
South Africa
Brazil
Thailand
Philippines

Happy Friday to you all. Go forth, readers, in good health.

Editor's note: That's a really good point, Dad. As a general statement, though, I would say the numbers having to do with TB in Africa could be more due to the relatively higher HIV/AIDS cases than pretty much all the other countries. According to an article I found on the World Health Organization (WHO) website, by UNAIDS, (http://data.unaids.org/pub/EPISlides/2007/2007_epiupdate_en.pdf) the African Sub-Saharan region is the most seriously affected HIV/AIDS region. This report also shows of some of the top 30 HIV/AIDS infected countries in the world, 22 of those are African countries.
So, while there is high TB numbers in Africa possibly due to HIV/AIDS outbreak, I would say, in my opinion, the rest of the world's numbers come from a high exposure rate due to a prevalence of the TB virus.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Based on the article.. how do you know if these statistics are more indicative of HIV outbreaks as opposed to TB.. since HIV suffers have a compromised immune system specific to TB??

ecmoody said...

Nice point