How can cascade analysis be used to improve planning for tuberculosis (TB) programs? This article by TB DIAH’s Ersin Topcuoglu, MD, MPH, explains how the TB cascade of care can serve as a valuable data source for analysis, which ultimately helps inform strategic, managerial, and operational decision making. This improved project and program planning helps narrow gaps within the TB cascade of care.

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MEASURE Evaluation, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), initiated a series of Quality of TB Services Assessments (QTSAs) to evaluate the quality of TB services in randomly selected health facilities in a number of USAID TB priority countries. TB DIAH will be continuing this work and extending assessments to countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

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TB programs face multiple challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect efforts to combat TB. This collection shares recent webinars, guidance documents, and other resources that shed light on the implications of COVID-19 on TB prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

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A best practice in facilitating tuberculosis (TB) data analysis and use is the cascade method for finding gaps in programs. Cascades quantify, track, and visualize how health and development programs are performing for the target population at progressive stages toward an expected outcome. They reveal weaknesses at stages of TB control and help program and project managers recognize unacceptable variations among different disaggregation levels and refine targeted TB activities for implementation. Ersin Topcuoglu, MD, MPH, explains.

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As the world has awakened to the urgent need to stem the COVID-19 virus and mount an aggressive and creative defense, those veterans of the tuberculosis (TB) fight have ideas and skills that should be deployed. In the spirit of cooperation and aligned interests, we offer here recent papers and resources that shed light on the implications of COVID-19 on TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment.

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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been a leader in the global fight against tuberculosis (TB) for more than two decades, funding anti-TB efforts in more than 50 countries. USAID’s Global Accelerator to End TB aims to support priority country ministries of health through delivery of technical expertise to increase TB and multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) diagnosis and treatment; strengthen local TB organizations; speed the transition of sustainable funding and management of TB programs to governments; and improve coordination of TB programs with other health programs. Helping countries interpret and manage their data to fight TB is a key focus.

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Global Panel Shares Tuberculosis Data Successes and Challenges At a major tuberculosis (TB) conference in India, experts from five countries spoke candidly about the kinds of data and analyses that could inform programs to end TB. Speaking at a satellite session during the 50th Union World Conference on Lung Health, in Hyderabad, India, they offered […]

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Data Hub Provides Visualizations for Decision Making From the community to policymakers to funding agencies, many types of audiences benefit from seeing a clear snapshot of a country’s progress to control tuberculosis (TB). That’s why the TB Data, Impact Assessment and Communications Hub (TB DIAH) project features a website with interactive, downloadable TB data visualizations. […]

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Union Conference Attendees Share How They Use Tuberculosis Data Helping communities understand the impact of tuberculosis. Analyzing the progress of meeting reporting goals. Gaining a better understanding of the scope of TB drug resistance. These are just three of the ways people say they are using tuberculosis (TB) data. The quotes come from attendees at […]

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USAID and Partners Celebrate Successful First Year of Accelerating Efforts to End TB Domestic and global stakeholders gathered at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in Washington, D.C., on November 26, to mark the first year of the Global Accelerator to End Tuberculosis (TB), an initiative of the United States Agency for International […]

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