VIRTUAL EVENT: Tuberculosis, technology and global health

The week of this lecture marks World TB day, 24 March, when Robert Koch announced his discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the cause of TB 141 years ago. A time when TB was the leading cause of death in the UK, Europe and many high-income countries.This discovery triggered a huge progress in scientific understanding and public health interventions which saw development of diagnostics, vaccines, mass screening campaigns and therapeutics for TB and notably the first randomised control trial. However, all this development occurred largely before 1950 and as TB became less of a problem in richer countries this scientific progress came to a halt.

Today TB remains the leading cause of death from an infectious disease globally with the main burden in low- and middle-income countries.  Following a period of inactivity we are now arguably in a technological renaissance in TB and with new tools designed for low resource settings. This lecture will highlight some of these recent developments and will discuss whether we can end TB as a public health problem in a generation.

This lecture will be followed by a Q&A with our speaker, Dr Hanif Esmail.

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #FMSLectures

Access profile

This event will take place on Zoom Webinar.

A link to the event will be sent to you prior to the event start time.

Live captioning is available for this event.

We aim to make our events as inclusive as possible, so if you have any accessibility requirements or enquiries that are not covered in the above access profile please contact the events team at fmscomms@ucl.ac.uk. If you could contact us allowing as much time as possible before the event we will be able to ensure where required that the appropriate measures are taken.