Towards a timely diagnosis of spinal tuberculosis

Excerpt

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major global public health concern, even though it is a treatable and curable disease. Statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that TB occurs all over the globe; there were 9.6 million new cases in 2014, a prevalence of 133/100,000, and 1.5 million deaths. The largest incidence was in the WHO South-East Asia and WHO Western Pacific regions, where 58% of all new global cases were encountered. Furthermore, the incidence was >10 times greater in low-income countries, and the mortality >20 times greater than in high-income countries. This reflects, in part, the large inequality of access to health services both for diagnosis and for treatment [5]. …