On World TB Day: time to stop TB

On March 24, World TB Day 2014, PATH joins global health leaders and partners around the world in encouraging work to ensure that everyone with tuberculosis (TB)–including the estimated 3 million people whose illnesses remain undetected–has access to high-quality care, including diagnosis, treatment, and cure.

Of the estimated 8.6 million people who developed TB in 2012, the latest year for which statistics are available, nearly a third were missed by national notification systems. TB, a curable disease that has infected one-third of the world's population, killed an estimated 1.3 million people in 2012. Drug-resistant TB cases are also increasing. 

With funding from the US Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other donors, PATH is working with countries around the world to implement high-quality TB control programs. We use the information we've gained in our work to inform global policies and enhance global partnerships. To fight TB, we:

• Work with partners and coalitions to introduce and expand the use of innovative tools to diagnose TB and drug-resistant TB.
• Reach out to patients and health care providers and encourage innovative collaboration between the public and private sectors in health care to improve diagnosis and care.
• Involve civil societies to raise community awareness of the dangers of TB and strengthen community involvement in referral, diagnosis, and treatment.
• Scale up efforts to integrate services for TB and HIV, diabetes, and child health in places where high rates of HIV, diabetes, and childhood TB pose added challenges.
• Integrate TB screening into other health services in order to support global efforts to find undetected TB cases.

• Our work in tuberculosis.
• Success stories in tuberculosis.
• Stop TB Partnership website.

Posted March 21, 2014.