WHO/Europe: Fact sheets on Sustainable Development Goals: health targets

WHO/Europe releases a blueprint for a people-centred model of TB care that shifts care closer to people and communities.

New TB surveillance report released by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the WHO Regional Office for Europe ahead of World TB Day.

Public Health Panorama is the journal of the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe). It provides a platform to scientists and public health practitioners for the publication of lessons learned from the field, as well as original research work, to facilitate the use of evidence and good practice for public health action.

High rates of multidrug-resistant TB and TB in vulnerable populations, such as the homeless, drug and alcohol abusers and migrants from countries with high numbers of TB cases continue to challenge TB elimination in Europe.

WHO/Europe, the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) and other partners organized a high-level regional meeting in Tbilisi, Georgia from 28–30 September 2015, to address regional challenges and discuss ways towards a successful transition to domestic funding of national responses to HIV and tuberculosis (TB) epidemics in countries of eastern Europe and central Asia (EECA).

Implementing the consolidated action plan to prevent and combat multidrug- and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (M/XDR TB) in the WHO European Region since 2011, Member States have made several major achievements in prevention, control and care. More than 1 million TB patients have been cured, including 53 000 with MDR-TB. Key challenges remain, especially due to ongoing primary transmission, increasing resistance of strains and deadly TB and HIV co-infections. The expected effects of the new action plan for 2016–2020 include curing 1.4 million TB patients, preventing 1.7 million new cases and saving US$ 48 billion.

Since February this year, doctors and nurses trained by WHO to use a web-based patient health information and guidance tool on a handheld tablet have been providing primary health care services to people in eastern Ukraine. Through the tablet, medical professionals have access to urgent care protocols and procedures based on WHO norms and standards, tailored to the Ukrainian context. The tool was developed to provide people-centred, real-time, comprehensive information and guidance. It can also give early warnings through syndromic and disease surveillance mechanisms.

In September 2011 the Consolidated Action Plan to Prevent and Combat Multidrug- and Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis in the WHO European Region, 2011–2015 and its accompanying resolution EUR/R61/R7 were endorsed at the sixty-first session of the Regional Committee (Baku, Azerbaijan, 12–15 September 2011). 

The National Tuberculosis Programme (NTP) in Belarus, in collaboration with WHO and with the support of the United Nations Development Programme; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (the Global Fund); and Médecins Sans Frontières, organized a workshop on "The use of bedaquiline to treat XDR-TB" on 7 May 2015 at the Republican Scientific and Practical Centre for Pulmonology and Tuberculosis in Minsk, Belarus. The training was conducted by WHO and national experts from NTP and the National Pharmacovigilance Centre and was attended by 28 participants.