Lilly: A Good Start to Ending TB in China

  Today’s guest blog comes from He Zhijun, Lilly’s CSR Manager and Program Officer for the Lilly MDR-TB Partnership in China.   In late June, I organized our first media visit to the Heilongjiang Provincial Infectious Disease Hospital located in Harbin, the provincial capital of China’s Heilongjiang province. The hospital is one of six pilot centers from the Lilly-China Medical Association TB Society collaboration focused on enhancing clinical skills of tuberculosis (TB) physicians.   Harbin is an old city and was an early industrial base for New China. This city of 10 million residents also has a strong connection with Russia and the rest of the world going back to the 1920s. Walking in the busy Central Boulevard and seeing a mix of Chinese and Western architecture, few people would know the province has nearly 190,000 people diagnosed with TB. Each year 40,000 cases more are identified and of those nearly 43% have MDR-TB.  With such high prevalence, bringing media here to better understand and report on this health challenge was particularly important.   Read more about the media visit and what reporters discovered on their tour of the Heilongjiang Provincial Infectious Disease Hospital.