Increased Funding needed as World TB Day Approaches – Organisation

Ahead of this year’s World Tuberculosis Day, marked on March 24, the Stop TB Partnership has called for an urgent and substantial increase of funding to fight TB in order to meet the goal of ending the disease by 2030.

The organization’s latest projections show that an average of US$19.6 billion per year will be needed over the next eight years for TB prevention and care, up from the pre-Covid-19 estimate of US$13 billion per year.

An additional US$4 billion per year will be required for research and development (R&D) of the new diagnostics, medicines and vaccines needed to end TB. This represents about four times what is currently available for the TB response (in 2020, US$5.3 billion was available for care and prevention and US$0.9 billion for R&D).

The year 2022 is critical for the global fight to end TB as the world faces a fast-running countdown to reaching the 2018 United Nations High-Level Meeting (UNHLM) TB targets, which the international community agreed to meet by the end of December. All projections show that the world is not on course to meet the UNHLM treatment targets set for 2022.

Additional funding will enable TB programs around the world to treat 50 million people with TB, including 3.7 million children and 2.2 million people with drug-resistant TB. It will also enable faster R&D, including new and effective vaccines, which are essential if TB will end by 2030.

Reaching the joint goal of ending TB is feasible if countries step up their funding commitments. Countries of the G20, for example, which represent 50% of the global TB burden, had a collective GDP of US$66 trillion in 2020, which is projected at US$99 trillion in 2026. The Stop TB Partnership estimates that mobilizing only 0.01% of this collective GDP would make an additional US$6 billion available per year for the fight against TB now and US$10 billion per year by 2026.

Director of the Division of Country Health Programmes, WHO, Dr. Nino Berdzuli said “we urgently need to provide the support needed to ensure continuity of treatment for people affected by TB, as well as to equip neighboring countries with the tools they need for timely diagnosis and treatment of refugees,”

The Stop TB Partnership is continuously monitoring and assessing the situation in Ukraine and is coordinating efforts with partners to provide seamless supplies of additional TB drugs to Ukraine if this need arises. They are also assuring that diagnostics and medicines are reaching the neighboring countries for uninterrupted TB care of people in need. The organization is also repurposing existing grants to support immediate emergency and lifesaving medical needs.