This year TB will claim 1.3 million lives and so I’ve joined 130 elected representatives from across the G7 and the EU to call for renewed action against the disease.

TB is an airborne disease and can therefore affect anyone.  But, as with so many other preventable diseases, it strikes hardest at the poorest and most marginalised in our societies, exacerbating existing rates of poverty and ill-health.

Parts of the UK have rates to match those found in some of the worst affected countries in the world, and London has the highest rates of any capital city in Western Europe.

Brighton is home to one of the leading international organisations working to eradicate TB - Target Tuberculosis. Its Chief Executive, Wendy Darby says “There is a lot we need to tackle the disease, but it all starts with political commitment.”

At the current rate of progress, TB will remain a serious threat to global public health until the end of the next century.  That pace of change is simply not good enough.  The only way that we’re going to beat the disease is if we have coordinated, global action.  That’s why I support the global call for a coordinated global action to drive down rates of TB across the world, and to accelerate progress towards ending TB as a threat to global public health.

This action must include investment in scaling up existing interventions, increasing the development of new drugs, diagnostics and vaccines, investing in innovative projects, and implementing programmes to diagnose and treat everyone who has TB.  If we get this right we could see an end to TB not in a hundred years, or two hundred, but in twenty years. We could be the generation that ends TB.

I also wrote to Jane Ellison MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health, about World TB Day. You can read my letter here.