The TB CAB was founded in 2011 by a network of HIV/AIDS activists who’d been deeply involved in the long fight for universal access to effective HIV treatment. This experience demonstrated the power that communities affected by a disease can have in transforming how governments respond to public health crises, and they wanted to apply those lessons to TB.
Since HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, people living with HIV (PLHIV) and their allies have been at the forefront of the global response. They forced governments to take urgent action to address the pandemic, advocated for research and development of new medical tools, won key legal protections for people living with HIV, and worked to shift harmful and bigoted attitudes throughout society. These efforts ultimately facilitated the development of antiretroviral therapy (ART), as well as various provisions that lowered treatment prices and made its implementation possible all over the world, saving millions of lives in the process.
Yet, throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, as ART was preventing more and more deaths from HIV/AIDS, millions of people continued to die of TB. While TB had been curable since the mid-20th century, there hadn’t been many advances since. The emergence of HIV exacerbated the struggles that insufficient and under-resourced TB programs faced working with a vaccine discovered in the 1920s that only offered limited protection, drugs discovered in the 1950s to which resistance was already spreading, and diagnostic technologies from the 1800s that were slow and inaccurate.
Clearly, change was needed — and Treatment Action Group (TAG), along with allies in other community-based activist groups believed the political mobilization of people affected by TB could deliver it. In 2011, the Global TB CAB was created.
In the years since its founding, the TB CAB has risen to global prominence in the TB field, improved research, products, and policies, fought to improve access to innovations, and in doing so helped to hold powerful actors at every level accountable to TB-affected communities.
For more information on the history of the TB CAB, including details on their past work on TB research and access issues, you can listen to this three-part podcast produced by Treatment Action Group (TAG). You can also read this detailed report assessing the TB CAB’s first decade, based on extensive interviews with former members and people who have worked with the TB CAB in multiple capacities.