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2016-2020 Global Plan to End TB requires $56 billion investment
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The Stop TB Partnership is calling for a 5-year, $56 billion investment plan that could prevent 45 million cases of tuberculosis and 10 million related deaths by 2020, according to a press release.
The strategy, outlined in WHO’s recently launched 2016-2020 Global Plan to End TB, aims to diagnose and treat 90% of all people with TB, including 90% of high-risk populations such as mining communities, children, patients with HIV, injection drug users and migrants. The plan also seeks to ensure that 90% of patients successfully complete treatment through select services and social support.
The “90-(90)-90” targets will be supported by domestic sources from high-income countries, and will be endorsed by worldwide politicians at the Union World Conference on Lung Health in Cape Town, South Africa, later this month. The investment will offer one of the highest returns on investment of any other health intervention — an estimated $85 for each dollar invested, according to the release.
The Global Plan also requires an additional $9 billion for vaccine, diagnostic testing and drug development. Mark Dybul, MD, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which supports nearly 80% of external funding for TB programs in low- and low-middle–income countries, praised the 2016-2020 strategy in the release.
“We applaud the launch of the Global Plan 2016-2020: The Paradigm Shift — we know that it creates the path toward an accelerated impact on TB epidemics and, ultimately toward ending TB,” Dybul said. “We are ensuring that our Global Fund Strategy 2017-2022 is fully coordinated and aligned with the Global Plan, and we will work together to implement it.”
To achieve the overall goal of the Global Plan to End TB, which is to eliminate TB by 2035, the decline in TB incidence needs to increase from the current annual rate of 1.5% to 10%, the release said.
“It is a global disgrace and human tragedy that TB — a curable disease — is killing around 1.5 million people per year and nobody speaks about ending it,” Lucica Ditiu, MD, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership, said in the release. “We know it can be done, we know how it can be done, we know how much it will cost us — we need to have the desire to do it and energy to move on. Ours can be the generation remembered as the one that turned the tide on this enormous yet treatable epidemic.”
Disclosure: Infectious Disease News was unable to confirm relevant financial disclosures at the time of publication.