Commemorating World TB Day 2020: “IT’S TIME” — It’s time to End the Global TB Epidemic

Abstract

World TB Day falls on March 24th each year, and it commemorates the day in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch announced that he had discovered the microbial cause of tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (WHO, 2020a,b,c). At the time of Professor Koch’s announcement in Berlin, TB was an endemic in Europe and the Americas, and caused the death of one in every seven people (Wallstedt and Maeurer, 2015). Koch’s discovery opened the way towards diagnosing, treating and curing patients with TB. One hundred and twenty eight years later, according to the WHO Annual TB Report, an estimated 10 million people fell ill with TB and 1.5 million died of it. Tuberculosis remains the top infectious disease killer worldwide (WHO, 2019).