Tuberculosis (TB) is a bacterial infection spread from person to person through the air. It mainly affects the lungs but it can also affect other parts of the body, such as the brain, kidneys or spine.
TB is a disease of poverty, affecting primarily young adults in their most productive years of life in some of the poorest parts of the world.
The resulting economic burden of TB on poor households can be catastrophic, leading to further impoverishment with knock-on effects beyond individual households to entire families, communities and government budgets.
In recent years there has been significant global progress in reducing deaths and illness due to TB. A total of 187 countries now implement the World Health Organisation recommended approach to treatment (directly observed treatment, short course), covering 97% of the world's population.
This has resulted in a decline of one third in deaths associated with TB since 1990, with an estimated six million lives saved as a result.
But the global burden of TB remains significant - more than two billion people, equal to one-third of the world's population, are infected with latent TB and one in ten will develop active TB at some point in their lives. In 2009, TB caused the death of 1.7 million people - nearly 5,000 people every day.
And considerable challenges remain, including improved case detection and completion rates, emerging drug resistance, HIV-TB co-infection and the need for more research and better drugs and diagnostics.
Fifty-seven countries have reported at least one case of extensively drug-resistant TB. Fifteen percent of all new TB cases are people living with HIV and AIDS. TB and HIV co- infection is now one of the most worrying features of the epidemic.
Improvements in prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS will benefit TB control. Co-ordination between the services for the two diseases is improving, but much remains to be done, including stronger integration between HIV and TB services.
Our commitment
We remain committed to helping to achieve the goal of the Global Plan to Stop TB 2011-2015 to halve deaths and illness of TB by 2015, compared to 1990 levels.
We will also contribute to the UNAIDS and Stop TB Partnership's goal of reducing TB deaths among people living with HIV by half by 2015.
This commitment was reaffirmed in two recent papers - in UK aid: Changing Lives, Delivering Results and Towards Zero Infections: the UK's Position Paper on HIV in the Developing World.
Our priorities are:
- to help increase access to and use effective diagnosis and treatment of TB including TB-HIV
- to invest in research and product development into more effective diagnostics, treatment and vaccines for TB and TB-HIV
- to support countries to strengthen health systems to deliver quality TB programmes, including stronger integration between HIV and TB services
- to work with our partners to tackle the risk factors for TB, including poverty and malnutrition.
The UK will achieve this through its bilateral and multilateral support.
We work particularly through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is the largest single provider of international funds to fight TB. We will use our multilateral engagement to drive results for HIV and TB. We support co-ordinated action through the Stop TB Partnership.
We are also a major supporter of research into TB and HIV, providing long-term predictable financing for technologies. We will continue to support research to develop more effective treatment to tackle TB and TB-HIV.