During this year’s World Tuberculosis (TB) Day, marked on 24 March, the Stop TB Partnership called for an urgent and substantial increase of funding to fight TB in order to meet the goal of ending the disease by 2030. The organization’s latest projections show that an average of US$19.6 billion per year will be needed over the next eight years for TB prevention and care, up from the pre-COVID-19 estimate of US$13 billion per year. An additional US$4 billion per year will be required for research and development (R&D) of the new diagnostics, medicines and vaccines needed to end TB. This represents about four times what is currently available for the TB response (in 2020, US$5.3 billion was available for care and prevention and US$0.9 billion for R&D).
The year 2022 is critical for the global fight to end TB as the world faces a fast-running countdown to reaching the 2018 United Nations High-Level Meeting (UNHLM) TB targets, which the international community agreed to meet by the end of December. All projections show that the world is not on course to meet the UNHLM treatment targets set for 2022.