Thousands of deaths from tuberculosis (or TB), an infectious bacterial disease, could be prevented using a new hand-held device that is being developed to detect potentially fatal drug resistance in less than 15 minutes.

European Union institutions and international donors cannot turn a blind eye to the TB and HIV epidemics occurring in the greater European region.

My name is Xolelwa Joni and I am 26 years old. I come from Cape Town in South Africa. After finishing my secondary school education I did a course in information technology. In my family I have my 85 years old father, my 63 year old mother, my 32 years old elder sister, a younger 11 year old brother and my twin sister from whom I contracted MDR-TB. All of us live together in a two roomed house.

Yogan Pillay, head of the HIV, TB and mother-and-child programmes in the Department of Health says he is committed to reaching the Millennium Development Goal of bringing down the high tuberculosis mortality rate by the end of 2015.

4 November 2013/ Paris, France – At the close of the 44th Union World Conference on Lung Health, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union) today announced it has received US $48 million in new funds for TB control in some of the world's hardest-hit countries and to continue critical areas of operational research.

International activists jeered at Indian officials during the 44th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris, France over the unavailability and substandard supply of tuberculosis drugs in India. Tuberculosis kills about a thousand people in the country every day.

"The Indian government continues to deny that there are drug stockouts. Innocent children are dying when people continue to say that there are no stockouts."

In the second of two linked posts (you can read the first one here), Lindsay McKenna and Colleen Daniels of Treatment Action Group (TAG) describe the importance of access to timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis and demand that urgency be returned to the global DR-TB response.

1 November 2013 / Paris, France –The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union) last night presented awards for scientific achievement and public health excellence to an eminent South African researcher and an innovative multidrug-resistant TB project launched in Siberia . Dr Kogieleum Naidoo received the annual Union Scientific prize for her published research on TB-HIV, and the Tomsk Oblast Tuberculosis and Pulmonology Medical Center in Russia received the Karel Styblo Public Health Prize for piloting the use of DOTS-Plus -Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course, for multidrug resistant TB (MDR-TB) - to combat MDR-TB.

As mentioned in our previous blog post, civil society actors are certainly making their voices heard at the 44^th Union World Conference on TB in Paris. Nowhere is this truer than at advocacy corner hosted by the ACTION partnership and the Stop TB Partnership.