TY - JOUR T1 - Increasing tuberculosis burden in Latin America: an alarming trend for global control efforts JF - BMJ Global Health JO - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-005639 VL - 6 IS - 3 SP - e005639 AU - Otavio T Ranzani AU - Julia M Pescarini AU - Leonardo Martinez AU - Alberto L Garcia-Basteiro Y1 - 2021/03/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/6/3/e005639.abstract N2 - ‘Of concern is the WHO Region of the Americas, where incidence is estimated to be slowly increasing after many years of decline, owing to an upward trend in Brazil during 2016–2019.’—2020 Global TB report.On the 24 March, we will commemorate the World TB Day. Despite important achievements on tuberculosis (TB) control summarised in the 2020 WHO Global TB report,1 the above quotation referring to the WHO Region of the Americas is concerning. In contrast with global decreases in TB incidence rates over the past decade, in 2019, the Region of the Americas has taken a step backwards and the TB incidence rate has shown an unexpected upturn in recent years (online supplemental efigure-1 in the supplemental file).Supplementary data[bmjgh-2021-005639supp001.pdf]The Region of the Americas comprises 46 countries and territories and Brazil and Peru are among the WHO high-TB burden countries. To illustrate the recent increase in TB incidence in the region, we selected 12 countries from Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela), which account for approximately 80% of the total estimated TB cases in the region. Using data from WHO TB databases (exported on 22 October 2020), we show that, between 2014 and 2019, the estimated TB incidence rate increased from 38.4 to 41.7 per 100 000 (8.6% relative increase) and the estimated number of incident cases increased from 202 290 to 230 100 (27 810 more cases, 13.8% relative increase) for these 12 countries (figure 1, for the same data in separated panels by each country, please see online supplemental eFigure-2 in the supplemental file).Figure 1 Estimated incidence rate, case notification rate and estimated incident cases of tuberculosis for 12 countries in Latin America between 2000 and 2019. Data generated … ER -