This World TB Day must turn a new page in the history of the fight against TB.  

WASHINGTON — New data from the World Health Organization shows that we have allowed a preventable, curable disease to become the world’s biggest communicable killer. The millenniums-old lung disease tuberculosis now outranks even H.I.V./AIDS in the number of lives it claims. The fact is that we’ve been very successful at curing people of TB since the 1950s — so why is this illness still such a scourge?

A new drug regimen for tuberculosis – a global epidemic that kills about 1.3 million people each year – has the potential to cut treatment times and costs dramatically.