Tuberculosis

In the history of humankind, tuberculosis (TB) has killed more people than any other disease. Today, TB remains one of the top 10 causes of deaths in the world and second only to HIV/AIDS as the biggest killer among all infectious diseases. New figures from WHO estimate 9 million people developed TB in 2013, with 1.5 million people dying of this treatable disease. This means that TB kills nearly three people every minute.

Target

Our goal is to achieve universal treatment coverage for tuberculosis, which would require increasing the number of people being treated for TB from the current 6 million to 9 million.

Situation

Tuberculosis is a treatable disease, but every year 3.3 million people with TB don’t know they have it, and many who test positive for TB either fail to get or complete treatment. Today, an estimated 9 million people suffer from TB annually, yet only 6 million of them are able to access treatment. Of the 9 million, an estimated 400,000 people live with a more aggressive and difficult to treat form of TB called multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB), of which only 100,000 received treatment.

Compared to many other global health challenges, tuberculosis receives far less global political attention. The result has been low prioritization on the global health agenda, significant shortfalls in funding and millions of unnecessary deaths. Today, there is an estimated global financing gap of US$ 2 billion for TB treatment and care and an additional shortfall of US$ 2 billion for needed research and development activities. Yet, investing in TB is one of the world’s “best buys” in health, yielding up to a US$ 30 return on each dollar spent through improved health and increased productivity.

Approach

Our approach is three-fold. First, working with the World Health Organization, Stop TB Partnership, and the Office of the Special Envoy for Tuberculosis, we aim to secure better estimates of the global tuberculosis burden and to determine if the number of cases and deaths exceeds current estimates. Second, we are concentrating on mining communities, especially in the southern Africa region, where the TB burden is highly concentrated. Finally, we are developing a strategy to engage the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) with the possibility of having tuberculosis become a signature initiative on their development agendas, as roughly 50 percent of all new TB cases occur in these nations and they are largely able to finance and address their own TB burden. Our partners have agreed that such a political commitment would give global TB efforts a major boost.