The Global Plan to Stop TB 2011-2015

A pandemic, by definition, plays out on a massive scale. Therefore controlling it requires a comparable scale of international consensus and commitment. This means having a sound roadmap that sets forth internationally agreed strategies for prevention, diagnosis and treatment, and research for improving all three; plus a clear plan for implementing those strategies worldwide. The global fight againts TB benefits from broad alignment on both.

In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the Stop TB Strategy as an evidence-based approach to reducing the burden of TB. Today, governments around the world have voiced their commitment to its key principles of achieving universal acces to high-quality TB care, reducing human suffering, reaching out to vulnerable populations, protecting human rights and supporting the development and use of new tools.

In 2001, the Stop TB Partnership launched the Global Plan to TB 2001, the Stop TB Partnership launched the Global Plan to Stop TB 2001-2005. In 2006, a more advanced plan for transforming these principles into action was issued: the Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015. Since then the Plan has garnered the world’s confidence as a roadmap for dramatically reducing the global burden of TB by 2015.

We are now at the half-way mark, and it is a fitting moment to look at where we are and where we hope to go. This revised and updated plan further illuminates the way forward to 2015 by taking into account progress since 2006, updates on epidemiology, policy and costs related to multidrug-resistant TB and TB/HIV; the importance of urgently giving a higher profile to laboratory strengthening; and the need to address the full spectrum of TB research in a coherent and coordinated manner.

TB is an ancient illness. By all rights – as a bacterial disease that is curable with antimicrobial drugs – it should belong to the past. In 2006, when the Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015 was launched, the epidemic was still believed to be growing by about 1% each year. The fruits of implementing the Stop TB Strategy and the Global Plan to Stop TB are now evident. The epidemic is in a steady, although modest and slow, decline.

Nonetheless more than 9 million people still develop active TB each year and nearly 2 million die. These figures should not inspire hopelessness, but rather an acknowledgement that TB is a unique pandemic. A third of the world’s population harbours latent TB infection, which can emerge at any time as an airborne and transmittable disease. Reducing this human reservoir of infection will require many years of steady and untiring effort –plus more effective tools than we have at our disposal today.

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