HIV/AIDS and TB Mortality Decreased During the Last Decade
The Lancet medical journal published on Friday the latest global, regional, and national estimates and analyses from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016), covering the period 1990 to 2016.
The good news, the authors say, is that globally, mortality rates have decreased across all age groups over the past five decades. For the first time, the estimated number of deaths in children under 5 years fell below 5 million, and there were 230000 maternal deaths. There were an estimated 1.03 million HIV/AIDS deaths and 1.2 million tuberculosis deaths. Globally, in 2016 HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis were among the five leading causes of total years of life lost (YLL).
Generally, communicable diseases decreased as a leading source of death, and much of this decrease was driven by reductions in large contributors to global mortality, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhoeal disease. Overall, HIV/AIDS deaths decreased by 45.8% from 1.91 million deaths in 2006 to 1.03 million deaths in 2016. Maternal deaths aggravated by HIV/AIDS decreased by 2% in 2016, and approximately by 14.3% in the period of 2016-2016.
HIV/AIDS mortality peaked in 2005 globally, with declining death rates probably reflecting the successful expansion of ART programmes and programmes focused on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission. An estimated 1.21 million deaths were caused by tuberculosis in 2016, a decrease of 20.9% since 2006. Among subcauses of tuberculosis, drug susceptible tuberculosis deaths composed the largest portion of overall tuberculosis deaths; the fastest decrease from 2006 to 2016 occurred for deaths from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (28.9%). At the same time, mortality from extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis at the same period increased by 67.6%.
In Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and in Southern sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe) HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of total YLL.