In Part 1 we asked whether the implications of the target for MDR-TB set by the Political Declaration at the UN and signed up to by world leaders yesterday have really been properly considered. In this piece, we suggest what’s really needed to see this target met (because despite it being such an immense challenge, it really still could be met). Yesterday’s Political Declaration on TB is (according the WHO) a tool “endorsed by Heads of State that will strengthen action and in

In the last reported years 6.4 million TB cases were notified to the WHO (of the total 10 million estimated cases), of whom 82% saw successful outcomes (i.e. a total of 5.25 million of the estimated 10 million annual TB cases or 52.5% of all estimated cases). Similarly, 139,114 of the globally estimated 580,000 annual MDR cases were put on treatment, but only 55% of them achieved successful outcome (69,600 successful outcomes or just 12% of all estimated MDR cases).[I] But t

Despite being immersed in the tawdry story of TB control (or lack of it) for the last ten years, we keep coming across something new that we didn’t know about this sorry disease and the efforts to control it that shocks us to the core. And with less than a week till the critically important High Level Meeting on TB at the UN we’ve just found ourselves shocked to the core once more - and this time it’s about the price-rigging of the new key anti-TB drug Bedaquiline. Time and a