The importance of community and civil society engagement to end TB has been highlighted in various strategies of global commitments. The WHO End TB Strategy, aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, emphasizes the role of communities and civil society in ending the TB epidemic by 2030. Furthermore, the political declaration of the 2081 United Nations High-level Meeting on TB Highlights the need to develop integrated, people-centred, community-based, gender-responsive health services. This guidance was developed in collaboration with civil society and other partners, in order to further strengthen engagement and leverage capacities of communities' and civil society in line with the End TB Strategy. The guidance emphasizes the complementarity of health systems and community systems; the key roles that people affected by TB should play in planning, decision-making, implementation and monitoring; and the role of ministries of health and their NTPs. It underlines the importance of fair, sustainable financing and of policy environment for community and civil society engagement. Its purpose is to provide guidance for communities and for all stakeholders in the health system for working together to end TB and strengthening people-centred care. Stakeholders in national TB responses include ministries of health, other government ministries, the private sector, civil society and affected communities, academic and research institutions, and technical and funding partners.

The Operational guidance on adaptation and implementation of WHO’s Multisectoral Accountability Framework to end TB (MAF-TB) provides practical advice on key approaches and interventions needed to establish the MAF-TB at the national (and local) levels with concrete country examples, best practices and case studies under each suggested approach and interventions. It is intended for use by all stakeholders involved in their national TB response, including ministries of health and other relevant government ministries and bodies, national TB programmes (or their equivalents in ministries of health), other relevant national programmes, parliamentarians, the private sector, international organizations, nongovernmental and civil society organizations and TB-affected communities involved in planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and review of the TB response. The stakeholders involved may vary across countries depending on several factors, including the epidemiology and determinants of TB, the institutional arrangements for TB care and prevention and the degree of devolution of the political and health governance system.

This report provides the conclusions and recommendations of the 22nd meeting of WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Tuberculosis (STAG-TB), held in June 2022. In its work on TB, the World Health Organization (WHO) aims for a world free of TB and, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals, to end the global TB epidemic by 2030. It seeks to enable universal access to TB prevention and care, guide the global response to threats, and promote innovation. The WHO Secretariat, at all its levels, requires regular scientific, technical and strategic advice from the STAG-TB, the most recent of which is outlined in this report.

WHO has published a global TB report every year since 1997. The main aim of the report is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the TB epidemic, and of progress in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease, at global, regional and country levels. This is done in the context of recommended global TB strategies and targets endorsed by WHO?s Member States, broader development goals set by the United Nations (UN) and targets set in the political declaration at the first UN high-level meeting on TB (held in September 2018). The 2019 edition of the global TB report was released on 17 October 2019. The data in this report are updated annually. Please note that direct comparisons between estimates of TB disease burden in the latest report and previous reports are not appropriate. The most recent time-series of estimates are published in the 2019 global TB report.

The WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis. Module 2: screening – systematic screening for tuberculosis disease is an updated and consolidated summary of WHO recommendations on systematic screening for tuberculosis (TB) disease, containing 17 recommendations for populations in which TB screening should be conducted and tools to be used for TB screening. TB screening is strongly recommendations for household and close contacts of individuals with TB, people living with HIV, miners exposed to silica dust, and prisoners. In addition, screening is conditionally recommended for people with risk factors for TB attending health care, and for communities with risk factors for TB and limited access to care (e.g. homeless, urban poor, refugees, migrants). General population screening is recommended in high-burden settings (0.5% prevalence or higher). Symptoms, chest radiography (CXR), and molecular WHO-recommended rapid diagnostic tests for TB are recommended as screening tools for all adults eligible for screening. Computer-aided detection programmes are recommended as alternatives to human interpretation of CXR in settings where trained personnel are scarce. For people living with HIV, C-reactive protein is also a good screening tool. This guideline document is accompanied by an operational handbook, the WHO operational handbook on tuberculosis. Module 2: screening – systematic screening for tuberculosis disease, that presents principles of screening, steps in planning and implementing a screening programme, and algorithm options for screening different populations.