The fight against TB has realized some incredible gains over the past two-decades, and has proven to be fertile ground for incubating new, innovative collaborative partnership models between the public and private sectors in areas such as research and development, financing, community care, patient support, and case-finding. And, political commitment to ending the TB epidemic has stepped up in recent years, per last year’s Global Tuberculosis Report from the World Health Organization. Nonetheless, TB has returned to being the world’s leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, causing more than 10 million people to fall ill every year. And the trendlines are worrisome – the number of annual infections has been rising since 2021.
The TB community now faces an unprecedented, challenging and shifting funding landscape alongside the epidemiological challenge presented by increasing rates of MDR-TB TB globally. New TB tools, such as a TB vaccine, are certainly urgently needed, and the global community must increase its focus and intention around committing to developing innovative mechanisms and pathways for scaling current and future TB tools and ensuring the sustainability of life-saving TB programming.
