Thomson Reuters Foundation: It’s time to confront TB head on
Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

“…The U.N. High-Level Meeting on TB, which will bring together dozens of heads of state and government, has the potential to be a historic milestone in the fight against the disease. Most urgently, we need political leaders to commit to reaching the people we are missing, closing the gap between the numbers falling and the numbers being diagnosed and treated. And we need to hold them accountable for making this happen, tracking progress against targets across every country. Closing this gap and accelerating research and development will take money … In the Sustainable Development Agenda, world leaders committed themselves to ending TB by 2030. We are not on track to meeting this goal. But if we grab the opportunity of the U.N. High-Level Meeting for TB to galvanize political commitment and mobilize financial resources we can achieve a decisive change in trajectory…” (9/25).

The Hill: The time is now for global commitment to address leading infectious disease killer — tuberculosis
Rebecca Martin, director of the CDC Center for Global Health

“…CDC is committed to continuing the fight against TB in all its forms in the United States and around the world. As a global community, we find ourselves at an important moment in the global fight against this curable and preventable infectious disease. The time is now for us to come together, be accountable, spur innovation, and invest in cutting-edge science and programs to defeat TB here in the United States and around the world. Millions of lives are at stake” (9/25).

Foreign Policy: You Can’t Treat Tuberculosis With Platitudes
Laurie Garrett, former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations

“…The TB community is hoping that the U.N.’s attention will do for tuberculosis what the 2001 special session did for HIV/AIDS. Sadly, it will not. … [O]rganizing worldwide efforts to save millions of lives requires a chain of command that features genuine cooperation among the U.N., large multilaterals such as the Global Fund, and thousands of dedicated NGOs that are fighting diseases on the front lines. But developing such a system does not appear to be a priority of the U.N. The great success in fighting HIV, pushed by the U.N., appears to be an exception to the rule” (9/25).