TB kills 1.6 million annually – Bill Gates

The Chairperson of the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, has warned that Tuberculosis has once again resumed its number one position as the biggest infectious disease killer of about 1.6 million people every year.

He observed that TB is an underfunded disease, pointing out that there is a lot of progress on the drugs and bringing new drugs in while also working on a vaccine.

Speaking with journalists in Abuja, Gates revealed that the clinical trial for the M72 TB vaccine is ongoing but will take about four years, adding that the vaccine may offer 70 per cent efficacy.

He explained that the vaccine trial, which would cost $500 million and some of the science came from GSK, is being funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation.

Gates said that the foundation is working on getting cheaper TB diagnostics to make testing for TB more affordable and accessible.

He said, “The foundation works on TB diagnostics because it’s still too expensive to diagnose, and we want to get a $2 test. We don’t have that yet, but we’re pretty optimistic we’ll get it. We have a lot of new drugs. The current drugs, sadly, you have to take them for nine months, and there’s some TB out there that is drug-resistant, either single-drug-resistant or multi-drug-resistant.

“We’re hoping that the vaccine will show a 70% reduction. We don’t think it’s likely it will show a 90% reduction. It’s possible it won’t work. It’s a very expensive trial. It’s about $500 million. As you said, the funding for that trial, even though some of the science came from GSK, the funding, all comes from the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation. And so we are enrolling patients today. We’re very hopeful. We’ll try other TB vaccines.

“The drugs, I guarantee you, will work. The new diagnostic, I guarantee you, will work. The vaccine, it’s risky. But we’ve decided to go ahead and fund it because there are no good TB vaccines. And this one, at least at the trial level, looks like it might give us a 70% reduction,” he added.

On agriculture, Gates observed that with new approaches, including weather prediction, giving advice to farmers through digital channels, and tracking plant disease to see wheat rust, Nigeria can achieve very ambitious goals in agriculture.

According to him, raising agricultural productivity in Nigeria is a very important part of economic development.

He said, “It’s not the only part, but it’s very important. And there are, you know, whether it’s better chicken genetics or even chicken vaccines or cow genetics for high productive dairy or maize or rice or cassava. And we have a cassava variety that has over twice the productivity of the traditional springs and that avoids the key cassava diseases. So the good news is that there will be these things. We fund a group called the CG system, which is the group that does overall seeds and then they work with the Nigerian National Agriculture Research.”

He noted that the foundation works with the agro-dealers and, in some countries, extension workers whose job it is to educate the farmers, adding that the ratio of extension workers in Nigeria is pretty low.

He said, “So even though they’re helpful, there aren’t that many of them. And so actually working with the agro-dealers, you know, some of the agro-dealers understand chickens, some understand cows.

“We focus more on the smallholder farmers. What we’re doing is getting them more information through their cell phones, information about weather. You know, the weather forecasts in Nigeria aren’t as rich as they are in, say, the U.S. And there are some new approaches using very inexpensive looms, using AI that would allow us to have weather prediction, like when is it going to rain, when should I plant. Through that cell phone, they are getting the price and the weather data.

“We really want to register every farmer and know a little bit about their land and what they’re planting, and so if there’s some disease issue, we can be notifying them, okay, there’s wheat rust, you know, here’s the fungicide you should use. In India, we’ve funded this, and this idea of digitally connecting to the farmers is actually pretty far along. It started about three years ago, and they’ve done a very good job. But, you know, it would apply equally well here. You know, figuring out who farmers trust, who they listen to.”