WHO’s TB program wins new respect, more staff
The effect will be to make TB more visible’
To those who were worried that the reorganization under way at the World Health Organization threatened to relegate TB to a tiny broom closet in the basement of the infectious disease "cluster," fresh hope arrived last month in the form of a newly invigorated program called Stop TB.
WHO spokesmen say the program is the way Director-General Gro Haarlem Brundtland has decided to signal the organization’s renewed commitment to fighting TB. One signal for the change in status has been an increase in staff, including no less than Arata Kochi, former head of the now-abolished Global TB Programme (GTP).
"Over the past couple of weeks, the WHO has boosted the Stop TB initiative with a much stronger commitment to take it forward," says Mark Fussell, public health adviser on loan from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a communications specialist for the Stop TB program. "They’ve tripled our hitting power so that we’ve gone from three people on staff to 10, with more still to hire," he says. "The effect will be to make TB more visible."
Along with more warm bodies, the initiative’s gotten a new name, leaving behind the old "TB GAP." (GAP stood for "Global Action Plan.")
"When Brundtland came on board, she decided we needed something bigger," says Fussell. The former GTP had developed a modest program known as "Stop TB." Brundtland adopted the phrase and unceremoniously erased TB GAP.
Grass-roots meetings to talk about needs
Just as with TB GAP (only more so, as Fussell explains), Stop TB will function as the public face advocating for weapons against the disease. That means raising funds, increasing awareness, and cultivating commitment at the grass-roots level among high-burden countries. "The last thing we want is for this to be perceived as something that comes out of Geneva," he says. In that spirit, Stop TB has recently convened a series of regional meetings in which high-level ministers and secretariats chewed over TB problems and solutions.
Next March in Amsterdam, the initiative will hold its most ambitious conference, a worldwide ministerial conference convening high-level experts from finance, planning, social welfare, and the other spheres of government to talk about the large-scale effects of the disease.
"TB is like polio in the mid-’80s," says Fussell. "We’ve got the tools; we’ve got the interest; and what we need now is more money to bring it all together."
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