The WHO package is designed to help countries close gaps in healthcare and ensuring that no one is left behind. (AP)The theme of this year’s World TB Day, which falls on March 24, is ‘It’s time to end TB’. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued new guidance to improve treatment of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and recommended shifting to fully oral regimens to treat people with MDR-TB.
On Friday, key partners will come together at a World TB Day symposium at WHO in Geneva to develop a collaborative multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral platform to accelerate actions to end TB. WHO will present the new package at the meeting.
This new treatment course is more effective and is less likely to provoke adverse side effects, according to a statement issued by WHO. The organisation recommends backing up treatment with active monitoring of drug safety, and providing counselling support to help patients complete their course of treatment.
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The recommendations are part of a larger package of actions that has been designed to help countries increase the pace of progress to end tuberculosis. “The theme of this year’s World TB Day is: It’s time to end TB,” said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesusl. “We are highlighting the urgent need to translate commitments made at the 2018 UN High-Level Meeting on TB into actions that ensure everyone who needs TB care can get it.”
Since 2000, 54 million lives have been saved, and TB deaths have fallen by one-third. But 10 million people still fall ill with TB each year, with too many missing out on vital care. The WHO package is designed to help countries close gaps in healthcare and ensuring that no one is left behind.
Key elements include an accountability framework to coordinate actions across sectors and to monitor and review progress, a dashboard to help countries know more about their own epidemics through real-time monitoring by moving to electronic TB surveillance systems, a guide for effective prioritisation of planning and implementation of impactful TB interventions based on analyses of patient pathways in accessing care and new WHO guidelines on infection control and preventive treatment for latent TB infection.
