World tuberculosis day 2023 - Reflections on the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis by travellers and reducing risk in forcibly displaced populations.

World Tuberculosis (TB) Day, March 24th, 2023, will commemorate the day in 1882 when Professor Robert Koch announced his discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) when TB ravaged Europe. Over a century later, in 1993, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared TB a global health emergency. Since then, there have been 60 million deaths due to TB. The tragic state of affairs reflects a great paradox – that, despite affordable and effective TB treatment being available for the past seven decades, the latest 2022 WHO Annual Global Tuberculosis Report highlights that TB remains a leading cause of ill health and death from an infectious disease worldwide [1]. In 2021, the WHO estimated that 10.6 million people fell sick with TB worldwide: six million men, 3.4 million women and 1.2 million children. Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) remains a threat to global health security. Only one in three people with drug-resistant TB can access treatment; many remain undiagnosed and untreated. TB today occurs in every part of the world. An estimated 1 billion people have latent Mtb infection (LTBI), where the mycobacteria do not cause clinical disease but serve as a reservoir and can re-activate at any time under conditions of stress, malnutrition, poor housing, co-infections and co-morbidities, among other [35]