Inter Press Service: How Prison Conditions Fuel the Tuberculosis Epidemic
David Bryden, TB advocacy officer at RESULTS and co-chair of the TB Roundtable

“…The state of the world’s prisons ensures they are ‘factories’ for TB transmission, including drug-resistant TB — now the single biggest infectious disease killer in the world. Tackling prison conditions, therefore, is essential to ending the disease. … Reducing prison populations and improved nutrition [is] important to this success. … Experts on TB also point to the need for screening and treatment, not only for active TB, but also for latent TB infection, which is very widely prevalent among prisoners, to support better TB prevention. TB preventive therapy, a course of antibiotics, has been proven highly effective but is still not widely used in high-burden countries. … With a strong commitment to finding TB cases, including those hiding in plain sight in prison populations, and support from member states for an independent and regular progress assessment, the [upcoming United Nations High-Level Meeting (UNHLM) on Tuberculosis (TB)] can be a turning point in the drive to end this disease” (7/19).