Keynote Speech given by Dr Mario Raviglione, Director of WHO Stop TB Department, at TB Symposium in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 14-15 April, 2011.
The era of anti-TB chemotherapy only started some 70 years ago, very late in the intertwined history of humanity and TB. The optimism that accompanied the introduction of what were at the time "wonder drugs" was quickly dampened by the realization that resistance to them emerged very fast.
This has complicated the treatment of TB ever since, making drug regimens more complicated, toxic, and protracted. The likelihood of a successful outcome of treatment diminishes as patients with resistant strains fail to resolve their disease despite receiving medications, decide to abandon their treatment, or die.
Drug-resistance emerges and propagates as a result of inadequate treatment and poor infection control. Modelling work, supported by some data from eastern Europe and elsewhere, shows that resistant strains can become very frequent if allowed to spread unchecked.
On 14-15 April 2011 more than one hundred tuberculosis experts came together in Tashkent to discuss their experiences with and the challenges around scaling up tuberculosis (TB) care in the Central Asia region. In the end, everyone agreed: urgent action is needed.
The symposium "Uniting to Scale up TB Care in Central Asia", organized by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Uzbekistan, brought together a wide range of actors from across the region to discuss experiences and challenges related to TB and multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) care and the need for scale up of access to diagnosis and treatment of the disease. More than 100 participants from regional Ministries of Health, international organizations and academics attended the symposium, exchanged experiences and discussed challenges as well as best practice examples on the way to scale up TB and MDR-TB care in the Central Asian and neighboring countries represented at the symposium.
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