Update of the WHO guidance on screening for active tuberculosis

15 June 2020 | Geneva – The World Health Organization (WHO) is convening a Guideline Development Group (GDG) to advise on updates needed to its recommendations on the systematic screening for tuberculosis (TB).

Coupled with other measures to scale up TB preventive treatment among populations at risk, improving adherence to treatment and introducing newer regimens for drug-resistant TB, screening for TB is one of the critical, scalable interventions available today to drive down global TB incidence as envisaged by the End TB Strategy, and towards achieving the target agreed upon by Member States at the UN High-Level Meeting on TB in 2018 to diagnose and treat at least 40 million people with active TB by the end of 2022.

WHO last updated its guidance on the systematic screening for TB in 2013. It is therefore time to review the results available since then from new studies, updated modelling and cost-effectiveness analyses, and the performance of current diagnostics and computer assisted detection of TB in chest radiography, to provide users worldwide with the best-informed guidance.

The GDG meetings will be held online in June, July and September 2020, in accordance with WHO requirements for the development of evidence-based policy guidance. The updated recommendations will be released in early 2021, as the screening module of the WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis. More details of the process, inclusive of brief biographies of the experts invited to serve in the current GDG, are available here.