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  • NEWS FEATURE

How COVID hurt the fight against other dangerous diseases

Campaigns to battle tuberculosis, measles and polio have all been set back.
  1. Leslie Roberts

    1. Leslie Roberts is a journalist in Washington DC.

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Armed police officers stand guard as a male health worker carrying a cool box administers a polio vaccine to baby in Pakistan

Health workers administer polio vaccine to children in Islamabad in January as an armed police officer stands nearby for protection. Vaccinators have previously been attacked in Pakistan, where rumours persist about immunizations being harmful. Credit: Sohail Shahzad/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

After India went into lockdown in March 2020, the number of new tuberculosis (TB) cases detected there each day dropped by an alarming 70% in one month. “It freaked us out,” says Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership, an organization in Geneva, Switzerland, that was set up to help combat TB, a disease that kills 1.4 million people a year.

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Nature 592, 502-504 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01022-x

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