The annual Global Tuberculosis (TB) Report from the World Health Organization (WHO) provides an up-to-date assessment of the global TB epidemic, the progress made, and the new and existing challenges to that progress. In November, the Global TB Report 2023 was published. At Revvity, we quickly started dissecting it to understand where we contributed to the efforts to end TB and where we still have considerable work to do. This year, the message is clear – to eradicate TB by 2030, we need urgent action and more commitment than ever from those leading the fight against this deadly disease. Here, we look at the key findings from the Global TB Report 2023 and reflect on what Revvity will focus on in the years ahead to ensure that the global suffering due to TB is ended by the ambitious 2030 deadline.

The 2023 report has confirmed that globally, in 2022, an estimated 1.3 million people died because of TB. This is a reduction from roughly 1.4 million deaths in both 2020 and 2021 and is only slightly higher than the number of fatalities reported pre-pandemic in 2019. The report highlights that the increased deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic amount to half a million excess deaths from TB between 2020-2022, compared to the number anticipated if pre-pandemic trends had continued. While this is a shocking statistic, the news that the number of TB-related deaths is reducing is a clear and positive sign that we are getting back on track, identifying and treating more cases of TB than we were able to during the pandemic. The 2024 and subsequent TB reports will hopefully demonstrate that we are back to year-on-year reductions in the number of deaths.

The report also highlighted that 7.5 million individuals were newly diagnosed with TB throughout the course of 2022. This is the highest number since the WHO began monitoring TB in 1995. It is hypothesized that this could be due to people developing TB during the pandemic and only just being able to access appropriate healthcare services to obtain a diagnosis in 2022. It is also a sign that our ability to diagnose, report, and treat new cases of TB is recovering from the disruption of the pandemic. However, the report also estimates that 10.6 million individuals developed TB in 2022, which indicates that even though more people were diagnosed this year than ever recorded before, an estimated 3.1 million with active TB still went undiagnosed and untreated.

One of the areas of the report that showed the most significant room for improvement was identifying and treating multi-drug resistant forms of TB. An estimated 410,000 people developed multi-drug resistant TB; however, only 175,650 were diagnosed and started on an appropriate treatment regimen. This demonstrates that we need to get better at identifying those individuals with forms of TB that will not respond to first-line treatment.

Revvity’s focus and role in the fight against TB is to develop and provide access to diagnostics that help us find and ultimately treat those infected with the bacteria. For over 20 years, we have been dedicated to identifying people infected with TB who haven’t yet developed disease symptoms or started transmitting the bacteria to others. This management of TB infection plays a critical role in ending TB as it breaks the transmission cycle. However, it is clear from the 2023 report that there are still gaps in the diagnosis of TB – and these are the areas where we aim to apply our focus over the next seven years to eradicate TB by 2030. Firstly, the available diagnostics are not capturing everyone suffering from TB, as 3.1 million of the suspected 10.6 million who developed TB remained undiagnosed. Developing innovative diagnostics that help to capture these missing millions will be essential to ending TB. Secondly, our ability to identify multi-drug resistant TB remains an apparent weakness in TB diagnosis. Diagnostics that improve our ability to detect and accurately treat all forms of TB will again play a critical role in meeting the looming 2030 targets.

As always, the report provides an opportunity to assess our strengths and weaknesses, and at Revvity, it renews our commitment to the fight against TB. We hope that in the years to come, we can bring even more tools that help us tackle this deadly disease and which will finally condemn TB to the history books.