Industry Voices—Innovative tools needed to combat the world’s deadliest infectious disease

With World Tuberculosis Day on March 24, new reports are shedding additional light on the lethal infection that is often mistaken as a disease of the past. Last week’s reports from the World Health Organization and Lancet remind us that TB remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease and highlight the challenges we face if we are to meet the international goal of eradicating TB by 2030. More than 10 million people in the world develop tuberculosis disease every year, leading to about 2 million deaths. Because of unrecognized exposure to an infectious patient with pulmonary TB in their homes or in the community, approximately 1 in every 4 people on the planet are now silently infected with tuberculosis. Two billion members of our global family have what is referred to as latent TB infection (LTBI) and are at risk for developing TB disease and spreading the infection further. Eradicating TB will require much greater effort to identify and effectively treat these individuals.