Imperial public health expert to head up WHO Tuberculosis Task Force

Dr Rifat Atun, Director of Centre for Health Management at Imperial College's Tanaka Business School has been appointed to chair a new World Health Organization (WHO) Task Force on Health System Strengthening and Tuberculosis Control. The initiative is led by the WHO's Stop TB Department.

Dr Atun is a leading expert in public health systems, and conducts research on behalf of international agencies on how health systems can contribute to efforts to control or eradicate public health diseases.

Dr Atun said: "Around one third of the world's population is infected with tuberculosis. Of these, around eight million people develop the active disease and each year two million people die from tuberculosis.

"The new WHO Task Force has been created as a direct response to the fact that tuberculosis is a treatable disease and those two million deaths need never have happened.

"Global leaders, through last year's G8 communique, and via the United Nations General Assembly and World Health Assembly, have pledged to respond to global disease pandemics and provide support to health systems to achieve immediate improvements."

Dr Atun, who leads the Business School's international public health teaching programme, said a WHO priority was to strengthen the health systems, predominantly in underprivileged nations especially affected by tuberculosis.

"There are many new initiatives in health system strengthening and the new Task Force will identify how the linkages between global disease management programmes and health system strengthening initiatives can be strengthened to reduce the number of deaths from this debilitating and prevalent disease."