Imagine a disease that is the world’s biggest killer, with 1.5 million people dying from it each year. It is a disease that touches every country, but some, such as South Africa, Uzbekistan and India, have been hit particularly hard. This disease has a treatment which, in its simplest form, takes six months to complete. For the complex forms, treatment causes patients to become psychotic, attempt suicide, or permanently lose their hearing due to side effects and offers a 50 percent chance of cure at best; yet in the past 50 years, only two new drugs have been developed to treat a disease that many think is extinct. The disease? Tuberculosis.

The 45^th Union World Conference on Lung Health held in Barcelona last week opened with the Health Ministers of South Africa and India making bold statements and commitments to address and reverse the TB epidemics in their countries. Five other countries also committed to ending TB, resulting in the birth of the Barcelona Declaration on TB.

Grania Brigden, TB advisor to the MSF Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, describes how the current drug R&D model is failing TB patients.

From Dr. Grania Brigden, TB Advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières’ Access Campaign:

"The side effects were intolerable," said MSF patient and blogger Mariam Davtyan, "I called the doctor and was crying. I felt so bad I couldn't explain to him everything that was going on. I only told him that I was absolutely unable to take those drugs".

At last, tackling tuberculosis (TB) in children is on the international agenda. This year, for the first time, an estimate of the extent of TB in children was included in the Global Tuberculosis Report. Although the report acknowledged that the figures were approximate and probably too low, their inclusion ends the paucity of global paediatric TB data. Also in the past year, there have been advances in paediatric TB care. The growing awareness and focus on the plight of children was reflected in the 2012 International Union of TB and Lung Health Conference held last week in Kuala Lumpur with workshops, symposiums, posters and plenary sessions on paediatric TB.