More than 2 million children and adolescents lack preventive treatment for TB, which is needed for those living with HIV or exposed to TB at home. 

In our newly released Partnership Report, we highlight how the Global Fund and Unitaid collaborate to accelerate equitable access to lifesaving health products that prevent, detect and treat HIV, TB and malaria. By combining Unitaid’s investments in innovative new health products with the Global Fund’s proven ability to take those tools to scale around the world, we increase return on investment, save more lives and reach the health-related Sustainable Development Goals more quickly.

Unitaid calls on Johnson & Johnson to drop secondary patents for the drug-resistant TB medicine bedaquiline, and to make negotiated rates with the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Drug Facility available to all countries, regardless of how they purchase drugs.

21 September 2023: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a long-term commitment of $100 million to Unitaid to bring faster access to health products in low- and middle-income countries. This funding doubles the foundation’s previous commitment and will support Unitaid’s work to accelerate the introduction and delivery of new lifesaving solutions at equitable scale, including those for maternal and newborn health.

Geneva, 20 September 2023 – As the United Nations General Assembly convenes world leaders at the High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis (TB) this week, discussions will focus on the urgent need for access and innovation to put an end to a disease that we have known how to cure for decades. Despite this, TB continues to kill more people each year than any other infectious disease.

• People living in close contact with a person with TB disease are at highest risk of infection, and account for a significant percentage of the 10.6 million new TB infections each year. 
• Analysis shows that implementing a combined strategy of identifying household contacts and providing TB preventive treatment is cost-effective and would cut deaths by 35%  among household contacts of all ages and people living with HIV by 2035. 
• Additionally, because TB diagnosis is so low among children under five – just over 3 in 10 children with TB are identified – contact tracing and prevention would have an outsized impact on reducing child death from TB. 
• TB prevention and contact tracing can be delivered cost effectively thanks, in part, to the significant price reductions in short-course therapy achieved in recent years. With further decreases in price and by improving the efficiency and integration of contact tracing into disease responses, the intervention could benefit from greater cost savings and public health benefit. 
• As world leaders prepare for the second United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB this September, up-front multi-stakeholder commitment and financial backing is urgently needed to reap the massive rewards of preventing TB illness and death.

19 July 2023, Johannesburg/Geneva – A new study published today in The Lancet Global Health found that the lives of 850,000 people could be saved by 2035 if short-course tuberculosis (TB) preventive treatment is provided to people living with HIV and contacts of individuals newly diagnosed with TB. 700,000 of those lives saved would be among children aged 15 years and younger. 

Johannesburg, 24 March 2023 – The Unitaid-funded IMPAACT4TB Consortium, led by the Aurum Institute, announced today that it will provide 250,000 patient courses of short course rifapentine-based preventive treatment regimens to seven countries to help prevent tuberculosis (TB). The patient courses will include the three-month 3HP regimen, and the even shorter 1HP, that is only taken for 28 days. This contribution is part of the Consortium’s ongoing efforts to end TB and improve global health outcomes. 

Partners announce two new agreements to lower the price of rifapentine-based treatments to prevent TB in low- and middle-income countries.

The #RightToPreventTB campaign focuses attention on the urgent need to scale-up TB preventive treatment as a matter of human rights.

As the Unitaid-funded ASCENT project launches the main research phase, investigating the effectiveness of digital adherence technologies and data-driven support interventions on TB treatment completion and success rates, Unitaid asked the researchers leading the study to tell more about their work and its potential impact.