WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan
"We need to tackle this problem as part of the larger challenge of increasing access to primary health care services. All people no matter who they are where they live should have access to TB diagnosis and treatment as part of a package of general health services that bring multiple health benefits."
WHO Assistant Director-General for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, Dr Hiroki Nakatani
"We need to learn from our strengths and weaknesses in TB control over the last decade as we step up our response to HIV-associated TB and drug-resistant TB. We can further innovate by collaborating not only across regions, but also across disease control efforts and with those working to battle other public health and development challenges."
WHO, Stop TB Department, Director, Dr Mario Raviglione
"In 1993, WHO declared TB a public health emergency and called on all governments, in all regions of the world, to make scaling up TB control an immediately priority. Today, 14 years on, WHO can report for the first time since that declaration, global incidence of TB may have peaked in 2005 with 8.6 million cases, and perhaps begun to decline."
WHO, HIV Department, Director, Dr Kevin DeCock
"TB is the major killer of AIDS patients worldwide. Anti-tuberculosis drug resistance threatens to complicate the TB-HIV interaction even further. It is imperative that HIV and TB programmes work together to limit the spread of TB and prolong the quality and duration of life for people living with HIV/AIDS."
Stop TB Partnership, Executive Secretary, Dr Marcos Espinal
"Tuberculosis remains a massive public health problem around the world, despite recent progress. Last year there were 8.8 million new TB cases and 1.6 million deaths from TB, many of them among people living with HIV/AIDS. And at present, XDR-TB, or extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, represents a threat to the entire world. Our best weapon is to implement the Global Plan to Stop TB, but the plan faces a funding gap of US$30 billion. Our arsenal of medicines to treat TB is more than three decades old. We need new drugs to fight this deadly scourge. And we need better diagnostic tests, especially in the face of XDR-TB, as well as the new vaccines."