In hope for 2016...
Even an intermittent reader of these blogs will know that the underlying themes of our blogs revolve around our struggles to make...
A letter to the World Health Organisation
Dear Dr Zignol ~ I write with reference to your letter to the Guardian of November 7th. You will recall, I’m sure, that you wrote in...
‘The time has come to move TB to centre stage’ – but what’s happening in India?
The UN has only ever previously called summits on health issues for three reasons: HIV, Ebola, and widespread chronic diseases (which...
Seeing politicians getting behind TB...
Last week at the ‘TB2016’ Conference in Durban, the official launch of an African TB Caucus was hailed as “a renewed political...
World TB Day 2016 - and 'bending those curves'..
It's World TB Day again, a full 23 years since TB was declared a Global Emergency, and FINALLY we are seeing some heat being turned up on...
To the UN, the WHO and the Stop TB Partnership: where are the targets for MDR- and XDR-TB?
Today is the UN's World Day of Social Justice. It's been marked on February 20th each year since 2007 (in recognition that exclusion and...
How to manage a drug-resistant pandemic? (2) Estimating the burden of disease at a national level…
In the previous blog we discussed the ways that the WHO generally use to estimate the proportion of the global TB pandemic that's...
How to manage a drug-resistant pandemic (1) - estimating the global burden
For some time we’ve been struggling to figure out how the WHO has been reporting that the proportion of MDR-TB hasn’t been rising (or at...
World AIDS Day 2015 and those tricky '90-(90)-90' targets
Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, made an exciting announcement this week. He said: “The good news is that we now have...
'Unchanged Melody (2)' ... further reflections on the 2015 Report
When it comes to measuring the progress of a disease three different methods of measurement are normally used: incidence, prevalence and...
