Over 61.4 million people in Indonesia smoke, with 65% of all adult men smoking. In 2020, the Joint External Monitoring Mission on Tuberculosis (TB) for Indonesia found that 36% of all TB cases (about 300,000 TB cases) were attributable to tobacco smoking. In response, The Union in partnership with the Ministry of Health, Association of All Indonesian Health Offices (ADINKES) and Asia Pacific Cities Alliance for Health and Development (APCAT) organised a high-level meeting under the theme “Invest in Tobacco Control to END Tuberculosis”.

In an article published in the journal BMJ Global Health, authors from the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign analyse the development and approval of two newer drugs for treating drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB), bedaquiline and delamanid, in the current pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) paradigm, and the failure of the regulatory approval process to define the drugs’ role in multidrug regimens to improve treatment outcomes.

The meta-analysis included 6 studies, of which 5 were conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, showed that the diagnostic accuracy for Xpert testing was similar to the former symptom screening and rapid test format.

RESIST-TB conducted a webinar on 14 April 2022 on the latest results in the recent studies reporting on pretomanid-containing regimens, ZeNiX and TB-PRACTECAL, for the treatment of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB).

Undernutrition accounts for a much bigger share of India’s counts of new tuberculosis patients than hitherto assumed, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Tuberculosis and Other Mycobacterial Diseases. The researchers have estimated that undernutrition contributes to 9,02,000 of India’s 2.64 million annual new TB cases, 40% higher than the earlier estimate of 6,55,000 cases attributed to undernourishment.

Two strains of the bacterium causing tuberculosis have only minor genetic differences but attack the lungs in completely different fashion, according to Rutgers researchers.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put tuberculosis (TB) patients inside the country at high risk due to the lack of access to treatment, while countries receiving refugees have been advised to screen and test certain groups.

The World TB Day 2022 campaign reached more than one billion people. The Stop TB Partnership provided a selection of campaign highlights.

Treatment Action Group and the Coalition of Women Living with HIV and AIDS (COWLHA) will host a webinar on 4 May 2022 explaining how community-led monitoring can be used to generate evidence for advocacy to improve the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of TB screening and diagnostic services. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) will host a webinar on 5 May 2022 to present the new WHO's End TB E-learning platform providing access to the new WHO e-courses on TB preventive treatment, TB diagnostics and drug-resistant TB. A question and answer session will also be offered.