A ‘Paradigm Shift’ Needed to End TB

We all want to ensure that our children have healthy lives. Yet TB – the world’s most deadly infectious disease – is responsible for far too many unnecessary deaths. Diagnosis and treatment rates are unacceptably low. On 20 November, the United Nations’ Stop TB Partnership released an ambitious new Global Plan to End TB, showing how the world can end tuberculosis (TB) within a generation. At the current rate of progress, it will take 150 years to end TB. The new Plan shows what we need to do now to meet the target of ending TB by 2030.

We all want to ensure that our children have healthy lives. Yet TB – the world’s most deadly infectious disease – is responsible for far too many unnecessary deaths. Diagnosis and treatment rates are unacceptably low.

On 20 November, the United Nations’ Stop TB Partnership released an ambitious new Global Plan to End TB, showing how the world can end tuberculosis (TB) within a generation. At the current rate of progress, it will take 150 years to end TB. The new Plan shows what we need to do now to meet the target of ending TB by 2030.

A fundamental shift is needed in the way we tackle TB globally. If countries work together to implement the Global Plan, more than 10 million lives will be saved over the next ten years. Alongside other donor countries, the UK Government should endorse the Plan, in advance of a replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria (‘GFATM’) in 2016.

Parliamentarians, both MPs and Members of the House of Lords with a particular interest in international development, will be very influential in this process. This month, please write to one of the Peers we have identified, to help persuade the Department for International Development (DfID) to endorse the Global Plan.  

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