Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading infectious cause of death and ranks ninth in cause of all deaths worldwide. Although it is curable, each day more than 4,600 people die of TB—as many as 1.7 million deaths each year. And, it is on the move: the latest figures from 2016 show that approximately 104 million people developed TB, including 3.7 million women and one million children. It is the most common cause of death for people with HIV.
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To learn how this work is continuing after the MEASURE Evaluation project, please visit TB DIAH. |
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TB co-infection with HIV is an issue that makes testing critical for identifying those individuals. In 2015, 35 percent of HIV deaths were due to TB. In Africa, where the burden of HIV-associated TB is the highest, the rate of notified TB patients who also had a documented HIV test result stood at 81 percent, up from only half in 2013. Another issue is that in 2015 almost a half million people globally developed multidrug-resistant TB, yet only 1 in 5 of them were enrolled in treatment.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has a goal for an end to the global TB epidemic by 2035. In order to reach that goal, efforts must be intensified and successes sustained through sufficient funding and access to high-quality data to identify what is working and what interventions are needed. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced in September 2018 a new approach to combat TB: the Global Accelerator to End TB is a new business model for performance-based investments in TB response. As part of that initiative, USAID awarded MEASURE Evaluation an associate award for TB data and systems to accelerate the global response to combat TB. This award—the TB Data, Impact Assessment, and Communications Hub (TB DIAH)—is a five-year program that is being implemented by the University of North Carolina (UNC), which is the prime for MEASURE Evaluation, and John Snow, Incorporated (JSI), one of the five MEASURE Evaluation partners.
MEASURE Evaluation’s strategy for TB DIAH is to provide more accurate and timely data to combat the disease, to share those data widely across all organizations fighting TB, and to establish an information resource repository as a lasting global good. The main objective of TB DIAH is to ensure optimal demand and analysis of TB data, and the appropriate use of such information to measure performance and to inform national TB programs and USAID portfolio interventions and policies. Through the TB DIAH Associate Award, the capacity of TB decision makers to collect, analyze, and use quality information to scale up high-quality and sustainable TB services will be strengthened. TB DIAH will be instrumental in establishing and implementing the performance-based measurement system under the new USAID Global Accelerator business model. Further, to help determine the impact of TB interventions, MEASURE Evaluation assisted with developing monitoring and evaluation standards and tools for national TB program surveillance systems to generate high-quality data for monitoring impact. As data from direct measurements within countries expand and improve, the estimates of TB burden can be refined to better track progress toward meeting the new targets set by WHO.
MEASURE Evaluation also supported USAID’s commitment to the implementation of its STOP TB Strategy to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with TB, and in particular to strengthen TB information systems.
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