WHO Releases Tuberculosis Action Plan

The World Health Organization and Stop TB partnership Friday unveiled a two-year tuberculosis response plan.

If implemented, the plan could save as many as 134,000 lives worldwide, the groups said.

The plan’s focus would be the forms of the disease that are resistant to standard treatments: multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.

To combat the new forms of tuberculosis, the plan sets the goal of increasing access to drugs and diagnostic tests and the facilities needed to process them, and stepping up disease surveillance.

We have sounded the alarm on the potential for an untreatable, extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic, said Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO Stop TB Department. Today we issue our response on behalf of all patients and communities whose lives are most at risk.