22 September 2023 – Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) welcomed the second-ever United Nations (UN) Political Declaration on tuberculosis (TB) in which world leaders committed to ramp up TB testing, treatment and prevention, and to close the deadly gaps in all these areas for adults and children.
To translate these commitments into action and also accelerate access to TB care for children, MSF urged all countries to urgently update their national TB guidelines with the latest recommendations by the World Health Organization (WHO) and to ensure that WHO-recommended tools to diagnose, treat and prevent TB are available to all. There is no room for governments to delay, especially because of the insufficient progress since the last UN TB Declaration five years ago: in 2021 alone, TB still killed 1.6 million people; the WHO reported that 4.2 million people with TB people went undiagnosed (40% of all people with TB); and cases of TB and drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) increased for the first time in many years.