Tuberculosis (TB) kills more people today than HIV and malaria combined.

Immigrant scientists play a vital role in the science and engineering workforce. In addition to contributing to their adopted countries, they have potential to use their talents to give back to their homelands. Giving back is not necessarily about giving dollars or relocating; there are a variety of routes to follow. While I can only speak from my personal experience in India, the lessons I have learned might be applicable to immigrant scientists from other countries.

The G20 Leaders' Declaration carries an important section on antimicrobial resistance, and tuberculosis is identified as a priority for research and development.

India has not delivered because of poor investment and weak implementation, says Pai.

In a paper published in eLife, Madhukar Pai and Jennifer Furin summarized the uptake of new TB tools such as GeneXpert, bedaquiline and delamanid, and identified the main barriers to scale-up and patient access.

The 2nd Edition of the BCG World Atlas provides user friendly, open access, and easy to access data on the current TB vaccine, and provides the clinician, researcher, and public health practitioner alike with resources and information necessary to interpret current and novel TB diagnostics and conduct fruitful research on novel vaccines.

The Channel features articles on all topics relevant to TB research and aims to showcase the most up-to-date research to assist various stakeholders in the fight against TB.

On 27 February, the WHO published a list of antibiotic-resistant "priority pathogens." The first of its kind, this list is intended to promote research, discovery and development (R&D) of new antibiotics, as part of WHO’s efforts to address the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and respond to an urgent public health need.  The hope is that the list will catalyse governments to incentivize basic science and advanced R&D.

Last month, India’s finance minister announced the government’s plan to eliminate tuberculosis by 2025 during the unveiling of the country’s Union Budget for 2017-2018. This is a welcome move: While ridding people of the burden of any disease is a worthy goal by itself, TB elimination provides perhaps one of the strongest economic cases for public intervention.

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading infectious cause of death globally. In 2015, WHO estimated that there were 10.4 million new TB cases worldwide. Six countries accounted for 60 per cent of the total burden, with India accounting for 27 per cent of the global cases. The WHO highlighted that about 4.3 million TB patients globally are "missed" by health systems annually and remain either untreated or unreported to national governments, which may undermine global efforts to combat TB. India alone has more than one million of these missing TB patients every year.