World TB Day 2017
WHO calls on countries and partners to "Unite to End Tuberculosis" for this year's World TB Day (24 March 2017). 49 million lives were saved through effective diagnosis and treatment from 2000-2015 but more needs to be done. TB remains an epidemic in many parts of the world, causing the deaths of almost 1.5 million people each year.480,000 people developed multidrug-resistant TB in the world in 2015 and 2 billion US dollars per year is needed to fill the resource gap for implementing existing TB interventions (WHO, 2017).
This week has seen the launch of WHO's ethics guidance to protect the rights of TB patients. It aims to help ensure that countries implementing the End TB Strategy adhere to sound ethical standards to protect the rights of all those affected.
Web collection
To support World TB Day, RSTMH Journals, Transactions and International Health have put together a collection of TB papers:
Alternative medicine: an ethnographic study of how practitioners of Indian medical systems manage TB in Mumbai - McDowell and Pai
Childhood TB: can the End TB Strategy deliver? - Seddon and Graham
Drug-resistant TB: deadly, costly and in need of a vaccine - Schrager et al
Strategies for halting the rise of multidrug resistant TB epidemics: assessing the effect of early case detection and isolation - Espindola et al
Lessons learnt from TB screening in closed immigration centres in Italy - Crepet et al
Assessment of current practices in management of childhood TB among frontline clinicians in Southern Nigeria - Chukwu et al
These papers will be freely available to read online until the end of June 2017 and are part of a wider Oxford University Press TB web collection. Read the full collection here.
Further reading
We have also made our Transactions March 2016 Special issue: Implementing the End TB Strategy and the SDGs freely available until the end June.
