World Tuberculosis Day 2021 Theme — ‘The Clock is Ticking’ — and the world is running out of time to deliver the United Nations General Assembly commitments to End TB due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

On March 24th 1882 Koch’s announcement in Berlin of the discovery of the microbial cause of tuberculosis (TB), Mycobacterium tuberculosis, heralded a major breakthrough, bringing hope for a devastating disease which at that time caused the death of one in seven people in Europe and the Americas. (Wallstedt and Maeurer, 2015). One hundred and twenty years later, and despite the availability of effective treatment for the past 6 decades, 1.4 million people die of TB annually (WHO, 2021a). Over the past 15 months, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted health services globally (Cilloni et al., 2020) and has negatively impacted on gains being made in global TB control efforts to achieve End TB targets (Sahu et al., 2020; STOP TB, 2019).