The World Health Organization (WHO) will host a webinar on 13 October 2023 to present the new Guidance on engagement of communities and civil society to end TB which aims to strengthen collaboration and leverage capacities of communities and civil society in line with the End TB Strategy.

20 September 2023 | New York The World Health Organization (WHO) has released Operational guidance for countries to support the  adaptation and implementation of the Multisectoral Accountability Framework to end TB (MAF-TB). It provides practical advice on key approaches and interventions needed to establish the MAF-TB at the national and local levels with concrete country examples and best practices.

World leaders at the UN High-Level Meeting on TB have approved a Political Declaration with ambitious new targets for the next five years to advance the global efforts towards ending the TB epidemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) provided the latest logistical information regarding the upcoming UN High-Level Meeting on TB to be held on 22 September 2023 in New York City. It can be accessed here together with various advocacy materials.

WHO urges world leaders to commit to progress on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and to secure health for all, end TB, and reinvigorate SDGs.

The World Health Organization releases an operational handbook on TB infection prevention and control, providing practical advice to complement its evidence-based guidelines.

The World Health Organization’s 2023 Model Lists of Essential Medicines, published in July 2023, features key updates to the TB section.

31 July 2023  | Geneva-- To inform research and development priorities for tuberculosis (TB) diagnostics and address unmet needs, the World Health Organization (WHO) is in the process of updating high-priority target product profiles (TPPs) for TB diagnostics. TPPs provide detailed technical specifications that are important to end-users (e.g. a test’s required performance) and operational characteristics to inform product manufacturers. Due to continuous developments in a TB diagnostic and treatment domains, there is ongoing need to regularly update TPPs in order to adapt them to an evolving context of a global TB control needs. Current update focuses on the TB diagnostic tests for peripheral settings.

25 July 2023 | Geneva --Targeted next generation sequencing (NGS) for the detection of drug-resistant TB is a new class of diagnostic technology. It provides an option for rapid and accurate genetic analysis and detection of mutations associated with resistance in a fraction of the time required for culture-based methods for detecting resistance. Various commercially available “End-to-End” tests for targeted NGS have become available in recent years that can detect resistance to multiple drugs simultaneously, provide rapid results with testing directly on patient samples, and have the potential to assimilate new information on genetic markers for resistance as they become known.

The World Health Organization (WHO) launched two new e-courses on national strategic planning for TB and systematic screening for TB disease. The new WHO e-courses have been added to the End TB Channel in OpenWHO. They are free of charge and self-paced. A certificate can be downloaded if a 80% score or higher is achieved in the final assessment.