With just $255 million spent on TB research and development each year, funding is currently just one-third of the annual target set by the Global Plan to Stop TB 2011-2015.

The United States plans to place 360,000 multidrug-resistant tuberculosis patients globally on treatment over the next five years, as part of a national tuberculosis action plan currently under draft. The plan – which is due to be submitted to the White House in September – aims to promote universal MDR-TB treatment, accelerate basic TB research, and strengthen domestic capacity to combat MDR-TB, according to Administration officials who discussed the action plan with stakeholders in July.

In an effort to increase coordination and collaboration on tuberculosis activities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and maximize the CDC’s impact on global TB efforts, the agency is consolidating TB and HIV activities under a revamped program in the CDC’s Center for Global Health, changing the Division of Global HIV/AIDS to the Division of Global HIV and TB.

This white paper released by Stop TB USA on World TB Day urges a more robust national TB response which focuses on diagnosing and treating latent TB to prevent future active cases.

Efforts to fight HIV and tuberculosis globally would work with less money overall in fiscal year 2016 under the President’s newly released budget proposal.

The world’s largest humanitarian and health program dedicated to defeating a single disease will have more to work with in the coming year, with a Congressional spending bill released Tuesday that increases, or maintains from last year’s allocations almost all areas of global health spending for fiscal year 2015. The bill includes a $300 million increase for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief over the amount allotted for fiscal year 2014, and over the amount requested by President Obama in his FY15 proposed budget. The allotment of $4.3 billion for PEPFAR restores half of the $600 million in cuts PEPFAR has seen since 2011.

The emerging crisis of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a “personal and health system catastrophe” that’s occurring half a million times a year in the form of new cases, Eric Nuermberger said at an IDWeek session on HIV-related opportunistic diseases. Not only is it an intensively difficult disease to treat, requiring up to two years of therapy with very toxic and expensive drugs with poor efficacy, “we continue to learn it’s even worse than we may have first thought,” he said.

PHILADELPHIA, PA- Without new tools, soon, to address multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, TB control efforts made over the last two decades will be defeated, Dr. Carol Dukes Hamilton said this week, in an IDWeek presentation. Hamilton, co-chair of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Center for Global Health Policy called drug-resistant TB a runaway train.

While development assistance to middle and low-income countries for global health reached an all-time high last year, assistance for “the main infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, contracted on the whole,” according to the Financing Global Health 2013: Transition in an Age of Austerity report published by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.

When USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah went to Congress to discuss the Obama administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2015, he began with remarks in which he made no mention of tuberculosis and aside from a mention of “creating an AIDS-free generation,” made no mention of the global HIV pandemic.  There was also no mention of global tuberculosis or global HIV in his lengthy prepared statement.