Financial Times: Letter to the editor: A baffling omission from the ‘priority pathogen’ list
Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership; Mel Spigelman, president and CEO of the TB Alliance and co-chair of the Working Group on New Drugs at the Stop TB Partnership; and José Luis Castro, executive director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease

“Sir, The World Health Organization has badly misstepped in leaving out Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) from its list of 12 priority superbugs for which new antibiotics are needed urgently. … Although TB is a bacterial disease, currently available antibiotic medicines simply cannot keep up against rapidly evolving resistance. … TB patients desperately need new and better medicines, and drug-resistant TB needs to be acknowledged as the biggest health threat in the antibiotic resistance crisis. … Yet the TB research community remains badly underfunded. … In light of this, the World Health Organization’s decision to omit M.tb from this ‘priority pathogen’ list is baffling. We have the evidence that no action in the fight against global antibiotic resistance can be truly effective if it does not include tackling tuberculosis. Therefore, we urge WHO to revise the list and include Mycobacterium tuberculosis” (3/5).