African meeting highlights need for increased political leadership in efforts to end TB

Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
May 17, 2018, 11:23 a.m.

Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’s “Voices”: Spreading Ideas to Help End TB

Eliud Wandwalo, senior disease coordinator for TB at the Global Fund, and Tina Draser, the Global Fund’s regional manager for Central Africa, discuss global efforts to address TB and highlight examples from five countries presented at a late-March meeting of national TB program managers, civil society, and global health partners from 21 West and Central African nations. The meeting also culminated in “a document called the Cotonou TB Declaration, [in which] participants urged governments in West and Central Africa to reduce the proportion of missing TB cases by 50 percent by 2020 and to reduce deaths among those co-infected with TB and HIV by half by 2020. They also called for urgent action to improve childhood TB interventions — prevention, case finding, and treatment — by at least 50 percent by 2020”.