World TB Day, falling on 24 March each year, is designed to build public awareness that TB today remains an epidemic out of control in much of the world. Despite the fact that effective cures have been available for decades, TB still causes the death of millions of people each year. 24 March commemorates the day in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch astounded the scientific community by announcing that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis, the TB bacillus. At the time of Koch's announcement in Berlin, TB was raging through Europe and the Americas, causing the death of one out of every seven people. Koch's discovery opened the way toward diagnosing, curing, and perhaps ultimately even eliminating this fearsome killer.
But progress toward realizing more than a fraction of that promise has come painfully slowly. Effective anti-TB drugs did not first appear until the 1950's, and treatment has not been available in much of the world. TB has sent at least 200 million people to their graves since 1882. Millions more are still added to that grim total each year.
In many ways, the tuberculosis epidemic is worse now than ever before. TB is still the world's leading infectious killer of young people and adults, taking up to 3 million lives each year. Now, the emergence of multidrug-resistant strains of TB threatens to return the epidemic to the pre-antibiotic era. And HIV is causing the disease to spread faster in some communities than ever imagined possible.
In 1982, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Dr Koch's presentation, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD) proposed that 24 March be proclaimed an official World TB Day. However, except for the activities of a handful of organizations, very little has otherwise been done to highlight the occasion since then.
In 1996, with renewed zeal for collaborative public outreach in the fight to control TB, WHO joined with the IUATLD and a wide range of other concerned organizations to increase the impact of this important day. All participants embraced a plan to commemorate World TB Day worldwide, hoping to make a real difference to the millions of people now suffering and dying from TB.
World TB Day is not a celebration. There is yet no victory to applaud. The greatest killer of humans throughout all of history is still at work, in spite of our scientific breakthroughs. World TB Day is a time to mobilize public support for an intensified effort to diagnose and cure TB on a global scale. In the DOTS strategy, we now have effective tools and medicines with the potential to one day virtually wipe out tuberculosis. What we need today is a worldwide commitment to use DOTS more widely.