Thank you to all our supporters for your help over the last year. Please support our Christmas appeal if you can.

Click here to read our appeal.

Click here to read about Raheena – a little girl who will be enjoying Christmas this year due to the life-saving treatment she received at Nav Jivan hospital in northern India, a TB Alert project.

Click here to read more about TB in children

“TB continues to ravage societies especially in underdeveloped countries. It is tragic that this debilitating disease, so wide-spread that it is known in every corner of the globe, has not been brought under control. The problem is huge, medical authorities cannot overcome it alone. They need our help, you can make the difference. With treatment patients can be cured, TB untreated is life-threatening. I would just like to point to India , the host of this [World TB day] meeting as a prime example of what can be accomplished if we put our minds and our resources into it. I urge you to support the Stop TB Partnership” [This is a global advocacy organisation of which TB Alert is the UK partner].

“Share the responsibility and share the reward of knowing you are saving lives. I am living proof that TB can be beaten. Every breath does count, so stop TB now and let people live!”

TB Alert, the British Lung Foundation, and the British Thorasic Society wrote to Rt Hon John Reid MP, Secretary of State for Health. In their letter urge the UK government to confront the problem of tuberculosis in the UK, and to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that the proposed UK TB Action Plan is published with no further delay.

Read the full text of the letter here [PDF format].

Around 5000 School children are in the centre of a TB scare in Aberdeen after a supply teacher is suspected to have tuberculosis. 2000 of the pupils had direct contact with the teacher, reported the Aberdeen Evening Express newspaper. The suspected Aberdeen outbreak comes only weeks after 130 pupils were tested for TB at the Airdrie primary school.

In the Grampian region of Scotland there are about 20 cases of TB a year - in the whole of Scotland there are a little over 400 cases a year.

In general TB in the UK is re-imported from endemic countries - often in Asia, Africa or Eastern Europe. We use the word re-imported as TB was exported from Europe to the rest if the world in the last century when 1 in 4 people in Europe died of the "White plague". TB does not respect barriers and passport control, therefore TB can only be cured by stopping it in these endemic areas of the world.

TB Alert often provides help to health authorities in the UK when there are outbreaks of TB. We have a series of leaflets that can be ordered by GPs, clinics and schools. These explain about TB, vaccination, treatment, Multi-Drug resistant TB, and more.

More information on TB and its treatment can also be found in the About Tuberculosis section of this site and in the FAQ section.

His main points were that:

• Multi Drug Resistant (MDR) cases have been stable in the UK at around 1 - 1.5 % of cases for ten years or more, a good indicator of the effectiveness of British public health TB services.
• TB is an airborne, infectious disease. No one part of the world can be isolated from the rest of the world. To achieve sustained control of TB in one country, control must be achieved everywhere.
• This report of the global danger of MDR, underlines that the UK a) needs to maintain and develop its TB services so that cases are detected and treated quickly when a person has active TB, and b) must maintain and develop the support it gives to those countries that are hardest hit by TB.
• Border controls have only a very small role to play. Experience of existing checks is that few cases of active disease are identified. Much more important is to maintain TB services and improve access to them so that individuals are diagnosed and treated when they are unwell with TB.
• Freedom of movement within the expanded European Union merely underlines the need to maintain good public health services throughout the EU, including Britain. Otherwise, East Europeans should be at least as worried by British residents of high TB boroughs such as Brent (where Mr. Sommerfeld lives), travelling to their countries.

Mr Sommerfeld can be contacted on 020 8969 4830 and 07979 860 266

The full text of the press release can be found here: MDR TB press release [PDF]

After a century in decline, tuberculosis is making a worrying comeback in London. While rates of infection have flattened out or dipped across the rest of the country, increasing numbers of Londoners are contracting the disease. Fifteen years ago, the capital accounted for three out of twenty cases in England and Wales; now, almost half of them are in London.

A new report from the London Assembly looks into the implications of the resurgence of disease in the capital and explores some of the measures which are being adopted to tackle it.

TB Alert supported the debate and gave evidence to London Assembly Health Committee for this report.

Click this link to read the TB Alert evidence.
Click this link to go to the London Assembly website from where you can read or download the report.

TUBERCULOSIS a Global and British Emergency
TB rates in London are now at Third World Levels
Briefing for MPs and Peers, 11am Wednesday 10th December 2002
Click here for full details of the briefing

Paul Sommerfeld, writing to the Guardian, comments on the insidious partnership between TB and AIDS. Click here for text of the letter [Printable format]

On the evening of March 24, 1882, an unknown country doctor delivered one of the most important scientific lectures of all time to the Physiological Society of Berlin. The audience included some of Germany's most eminent scientists and physicians, who listened intently as small, bespectacled Robert Koch drew their attention to the table in front of him, where he had prepared glass slides of animal and human tissue for examination under the microscope.

"Now -- under the microscope the structures of the animal tissues, such as the nucleus and its breakdown products, are brown, while the tubercle bacteria are a beautiful blue,'' he said...more