TUBERCULOSIS: What is the impact of TB on women and children?

TB will claim the lives of more than 4 million women between now and 2015.
That is roughly the equivalent of all the women and girls in New York City.
TB is the number three cause of death among women and therefore has a massive impact on mothers and their children. The stakes are high - up to four million women will die between 2011 and 2015 and millions of children will be orphaned without rapid scale-up of TB care.
What role does TB control play in fighting poverty?
More than three quarters of all TB cases are among people 15–54 years old – those in their prime working years. The disease is a major cause of poverty because people with TB are often too sick to work, and they and their families have to pay for treatment.
A recent World Bank research study found that aggressive TB control could yield
substantial economic gains for low- and middle-income countries. The countries
with the world’s highest numbers of TB cases could earn about 10 times more
than they spend on TB diagnosis and treatment by signing on to the Global
Plan to Stop TB.
How can fighting TB help reverse the tide of deaths from HIV?
One of four deaths among people living with HIV is from TB. Every three minutes
a person living with HIV has his or her life cut off prematurely by TB.
People who have tested positive for HIV need to be routinely screened for TB;
treated if they have active disease or provided with isoniazid preventive therapy if they are unlikely to have active TB; and protected against TB transmission. The
solution is clear, yet in 2008 only 5% of the 33 million people living with HIV were screened for TB.
People known to have TB and those presenting with TB signs and symptoms
need to be offered HIV testing, treatment, care and support; and people who present for HIV testing and care need to receive appropriate TB prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Integration of HIV and TB services in all health care settings is key to achieving these goals.
In July the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the
Stop TB Partnership signed a landmark memorandum of understanding. The
agreement binds the two organizations together in a common goal: to call on
countries to scale up these joint activities sufficiently to halve the number of people living with HIV who die from TB by 2015, compared to 2004 levels.
How much progress has been made on the MDG targets for TB?
There have also been remarkable achievements in the past decade. The
MDG target for halting the incidence of TB is on track and prevalence and mortality are falling slowly. Soon to be released studies will show that as a result
of following WHO recommended standards, tuberculosis mortality among HIVnegative people fell 39% between 1990 and 2009, and could be halved by 2015.
http://www.stoptb.org/assets/documents/resources/factsheets/Tuberculosis%20and%20the%20Millenium%20Development%20Goals_2010.pdf