Blogs address issues surrounding TB, World TB Day

On Sunday, March 24, the international community observed World TB Day. The following is a summary of blog posts published in recognition of the day.

• USAID's "IMPACTblog": David Greeley, senior vice president of the TB Alliance, examines the need for improved treatment options for childhood TB (3/22). In a second post, Natalia Machuca, infectious disease adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean, discusses TB in the slums of Latin America (3/24).
• U.S. State Department's "DipNote": "Today, TB is the leading cause of death among people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa -- accounting for 1,000 lives lost each day. Given this enormous human toll, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) continues to address the deadly links between TB and HIV as a top policy and programmatic priority," Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. global AIDS coordinator and head of the State Department's Office of Global Health Diplomacy, writes in the blog. He outlines these efforts and writes, "On this World TB Day, let us all recommit to saving even more lives in 2013 by keeping our focus firmly on the intersection between TB and HIV" (3/23).
• Management Sciences for Health's (MSH) "Global Health Impact": "This global call to action -- the Stop TB Partnership's theme for March 24, World TB Day 2013 -- is as relevant now as it was over a hundred years ago," Pedro Suarez, global TB technical lead at MSH, and Andre Zagorski, principal technical adviser for TB at MSH, write in the blog. "Progress toward reducing the global burden of tuberculosis (TB) has been impressive in recent years: TB mortality has fallen by 41 percent since 1990," they state, adding, "Yet, TB remains one of the world's leading causes of death" (3/22).
• Intrahealth's "Global Health Blog": Intrahealth Communications Manager Sarah Dwyer writes in the blog about an advocacy group called TB Proof that educates health care workers about their risk of contracting tuberculosis on the job and "urges worldwide preventive action now before strains of [multidrug-resistant TB] spread more widely" (3/22).
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Impatient Optimists": Jan Gheuens, interim director of the foundation's TB program, writes about the "growing threat of MDR-TB" and advances in TB diagnostics, treatment and vaccine research (3/22). In another post, Trevor DeWitt, new media communications officer at the foundation, presents several facts about the disease through an infographic (3/22).