On 13 November, the European Respiratory Society (ERS) organised a lunch debate “Tuberculosis in Europe: Eliminating the modern threat” hosted by Members of European Parliament (MEPs) Maria da Graça Carvalho and Carl Schlyter in the European Parliament. The meeting was a good opportunity to review the situation of the TB epidemic in the region and take stock of the work of the European Institutions in the fight against the disease.

On 13th November, the Global Fund Secretariat organised a consultation at WHO Europe headquarters in Copenhagen to define a regional TB strategy for the implementation of its New Funding Model (NFM) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA).

As mentioned in our previous blog post, civil society actors are certainly making their voices heard at the 44^th Union World Conference on TB in Paris. Nowhere is this truer than at advocacy corner hosted by the ACTION partnership and the Stop TB Partnership.

Health experts across Europe applaud the UK’s pledge to commit up to £1bn to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The UK’s announcement, together with France and the Nordic countries’ recent pledges, represents significant leadership in the battle to defeat some of the world’s top infectious disease killers. Health organisations are calling on the European Commission and European Union member states to join these efforts.

Tuberculosis and, in particular, drug-resistant forms of the disease have long been a burden on many countries in Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation is no exception. A video recently produced by Channel 4 News in the UK highlights the growing problem that the country has with multidrug-resistant TB in the general population but also in children and in prisons.

On 17th May 2013, seven civil society organisations in Moldova have recently come together to found the ‘National Platform of CSOs active in the field of TB control’. The group was formed in order to ensure that individual organisations working at a community level could harness their collective energy and have a significant positive impact at a national level.

Together, let’s use this great opportunity to put TB higher on the political agenda of the EU!

A new film produced for the International Committee of the Red Cross shows how Azerbaijan has managed to achieve some of the best cure rates for multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) in prisons in the former Soviet Union and one of the best worldwide.

The difficulty faced fighting tuberculosis (TB) in Romania has been highlighted this week in a video produced for Al Jazeera. The short but highly informative news item notes how the dual problem of a lack of adequate funding combined with entrenched social stigma make fighting the disease incredibly difficult.

The TB Europe Coalition calls on the European Commission to increase public health funding to fight resurgence of tuberculosis in Europe and eradicate deadly strains.