TB becomes most common infectious disease

By Yun Suh-young

The number of tuberculosis (TB) patients exceeded 40,126 last year, accounting for 43.1 percent of the total outbreaks of infectious diseases, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said Wednesday.

TB cases were up 1.4 percent from the previous year. The total number of patients that suffered from TB and other infectious diseases stood at 93,119.

The number of tuberculosis patients has been increasing over the past five years.

In 2008, there were 34,157 TB patients but the number rose to 35,845 in 2009, 36,305 in 2010 and 39,557 in 2011.

Other frequently occurring infectious diseases were chicken pox (29.8 percent), scrub typhus (9.3 percent), mumps (8.1 percent), and hepatitis B (3.6 percent).

The number of patients with acute infectious diseases decreased by 10.5 percent last year from the previous one but diseases such as hepatitis B, mumps, and scrub typhus increased.

More cases of infectious diseases have been reported as monitoring people’s health has increased, according to the KCDC.

Korea tops the list of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations for tuberculosis occurrences and records the highest death rate for the disease.

In November last year, tuberculosis broke out in three schools in Seoul. Two high schools in Geumcheon-gu, Seoul, reported that 67 of its students were infected with TB. A middle school in Gangnam, southern Seoul, also reported that they had a student with tuberculosis.

The Korean government plans to cut the disease occurrence ratio by half by the end of 2020. It has devised a five-year plan starting this year until the end of 2017 to invest in tuberculosis management and treatment and will spend 345 billion won on the project.

There were 8,632 recorded scrub typhus patients last year, the most since monitoring began in 1994. The disease stems from bites from ticks and is linked to global warming. The number of patients with dengue fever which is transmitted by mosquitoes also doubled in 2012 from the previous year.