The Lancet recently released a report entitled "Building a tuberculosis-free world: The Lancet Commission on tuberculosis," calling for an increased investment in evidence-based interventions to diagnose, treat, and prevent tuberculosis (TB), especially in high-burden countries, which could help end TB by 2045. In this exclusive MedPage Today video filmed at the recent annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), Michael Reid, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, discusses the report's four key messages. Following is a transcript of his remarks: I think the key things to sort of emphasize at this venue is how important and devastating TB is for people living with HIV. It's the #1 infectious disease killer amongst people with HIV, and in fact globally, it's the #1 infectious disease killer. It's a cause of profound suffering for people with HIV and more generally. This report, which is entitled, "The Lancet Commission on TB: Building a TB-Free World," reflects the perspectives and inputs from global leaders as to what are the important investment priorities if we're going to drive down TB incidence towards a TB-free world. Absolutely, so the report sort of makes four key messages. #1: We should be implementing evidence-proven strategies that we know work. That involves delivering patient-centered care, scaling up access to prevention interventions, making universal access to drug susceptibility, testing, and second-line drugs universally available. #2: We need new tools and that means investing in the relevant R&D and the report includes an economic analysis demonstrating that in a high-burden country like India, the lack of new tools costs the economy $8 billion a year. #3: We need new and innovative ways of financing TB. We need to recognize that globally high-burden countries need to and are already funding most of their TB response, but more could be done in terms of allocating resources domestically towards TB. Donor-funded agencies have an important role, particularly in the high-burden, low-income countries. Then #4: In order to end TB, we need to create that enabling environment that will drive down incidence and mortality. That involves engaging stakeholders from across different sectors. It involves emphasizing the importance of global accountability, and recognizing that TB survivors and their advocates are an essential constituency that we can't neglect and must sort of include in all policy-related decisions. We have economic analysis in the report that underscores all of these different elements, as well as FE modeling that demonstrates what are the key priorities that will be essential to ending the epidemic. Source
