UCL-TB blogs

Reflecting on a successful World TB Day Symposium 2025
by Marc Lipman
16th April 2025

Our annual World TB Day symposium, held on March 24th, 2025, brought together a vibrant mix of national and international voices, researchers, policymakers, and individuals with lived experience of tuberculosis (TB)[…]

UKAPTB meeting: Strengthening partnerships across the UK to end TB
by Jessica Potter
19th February 2024

UK Academics and Professionals to End TB (UKAPTB) are a grassroots network of healthcare professionals and researchers interested in working together to push for changes in policy and funding that will bolster efforts to eliminate TB. We held our first in-person meeting on Friday 26th January 2024 hosted by the Centre for Tuberculosis Research at […]

TB at the UN 2023
by Marc Lipman
26th October 2023

Marc Lipman and Ibrahim Abubakar attended the recent UNHLM in New York – the second to have a session focused on TB. Here Marc reflects on the meeting. The UN High Level Meeting (UNHLM) on TB took place during the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Friday 22 September […]

Challenges of combatting tuberculosis in Gabon
by Pacome Abdul
22nd May 2023

One of the pleasures of working in UCL is the opportunity to host visitors from around the world. One of our guests to the UCL Centre for Clinical Microbiology at Royal Free has been Dr Pacome Achimi Abdul, who heads the CERMEL (Centre de Recherches Médicales de Lambaréné) TB laboratory based in Lambaréné, Gabon. In this blog, he talks about the work of his laboratory.

Learning to embrace the blips: the highs and lows of running workshops
by Linzy Elton
17th April 2023

My name is Linzy and for the last four and a half years I’ve been working as a postdoc researcher at the Centre for Clinical Microbiology at UCL in London. My job is pretty varied and I work on lots of different projects, including antimicrobial resistance, clinical microbiology, tuberculosis and sequencing methodology. I’m also part […]

TB on a scroll
by Sreyashi Basu
22nd September 2020

In a previous blog post, Sreyashi Basu described how she set up a TB education initiative, Joi Hok! in Kolkata, including a painted scroll that was used as a visual aid. Here she describes the scroll and explains how it is used. Sreyashi Basu writes: The Patachitra painting is made by Swarna Chitrakar, a traditional scroll painter who hails from a place called Naya village in Medinipur District. She sings about different aspects of TB as she unfurls the large scroll painting to depict the sequence of events. The culture of Patachitra music (or Patua Sangeet) have been passed down for generations and unlike other kinds of music is performed acapella style. Here I sing about TB in Bengali, and unlike Swarna, am accompanied by my ukelele.

JoiHok!: New UCL graduate sets up TB initiative in Kolkata
by Neil Stoker
30th March 2020

I met Sreyashi Basu in mid-January this year. She’d dropped in to say hello to Prof Tim McHugh, who’d been a project supervisor during her UCL BSc course, which had finished the previous summer. I was amazed at how she had spent the six months after graduating setting up a TB initiative in Kolkata from […]

The Three Sisters and the Fourth Horseman
by Neil Stoker
20th May 2019

Anton Chekhov’s life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1904. To mark International Clinical Trials Day, Prof Neil Stoker wonders how the then-incurable disease may have affected Chekov’s creativity and worldview, and reflects on the medical advances made by clinical trials since. Last week I exited a performance of The Three Sisters by Chekhov at […]

World TB Day 2019 blog
by Neil Stoker
6th April 2019

Professor Neil Stoker attended two events to mark World TB Day 2019; firstly, a reception at the UK Parliament and secondly, our World TB Day Symposium. Neil shares his reflections here. The political and the personal “28th of January. We have to strike a pretty miserable deal with our drug resistant TB patients. Their […]