| Summary: | In 2015, 6.4 million cases of TB were notified by national TB control programmes and reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) (83.0 per 100,000 population). Of these, 85% were new pulmonary sputum smear positive cases. Approximately 1.8 million TB deaths occurred globally in 2015. 1 In 2015, 307,202 cases of TB were reported by 51 of the 53 countries of the WHO European Region. The overall notification rate averaged at 34.5 cases per 100,000, with a wide variation between countries and an incremental west-to-east gradient.2 Figure 1 displays a map of TB notification rates in 2015 in the WHO European region. The lowest rate in the region occurred in Western Europe (EU countries plus Iceland and Norway) at 11.7 per 100,000 population, with rates lower than 10 per 100,000 reported in 22 countries and higher than 20 per 100,000 in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal and Romania. In 2015, 29.8% of reported TB cases in Western Europe were foreign born. This proportion ranged from 0.2% to 89.5% across 29 countries of the EU/EEA. Multidrug-resistance (MDR) remained most frequent in the Baltic States (11.1-21.2%). Other countries reported lower levels of multidrugresistant TB (MDR-TB) ranging from 0.0-6.0%. In 2015, 251,715 notifications were reported from 23 of the 25 non-EU European and central Asian countries of which 52% were from the Russian Federation. The highest rates per 100,000 population in this region were reported by Kyrgyzstan (131.9.0), Moldova (103.5), Russia (91.2) and Georgia (90.3), while the lowest rates were reported by Monaco (0.0), Andorra (5.7) and Switzerland (6.8). The highest burden of MDR-TB cases in the WHO European region is in the non-EU European and central Asian countries where the prevalence is 31.4% in culture confirmed pulmonary cases. This is seven times higher than the proportion reported in the EU/EEA countries (4.5%). Overall, the proportion of culture confirmed pulmonary cases with MDR-TB across the entire WHO European region was 25.0%. In Ireland, national ...
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