 Tuberculosis has been there for over 140 years. So many people try to find ways to eliminate tuberculosis, but so far we haven't been able to do it. Every year, about 10 million people on Earth suffering from tuberculosis. So why we cannot eliminate tuberculosis? This is a big question that I want to answer. We have around 200,000 TB patients a year. Only 60% were diagnosed and 40% do not know that they have the disease. In the middle of 2019, I was informed that I have tuberculosis. I had to say that when I received that information, I was not a doctor. I feel like I was a patient. The nurse was afraid of me because of my disease. After I experienced the whole treatment period, which lasted for six months, I had a lot of thoughts about how the patient would cope with the whole process. I thought that I'm a doctor and it's already difficult. My name is Greg Fox. I'm a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Sydney and a research leader at the Bullcock Institute of Medical Research. I moved over to Vietnam in 2009 to undertake a PhD looking at tuberculosis transmission. I moved across there with very little knowledge of Vietnamese culture and language and began working with our partners who became long-standing collaborators at the National Lung Hospital in Hanoi. It was quite an overwhelming experience. Thanks to the grace and the patience of my collaborators, we were able to start up this study of TB screening in... We started a research project in Ca Mau province, the most southern part of Vietnam. And what's interesting and very surprising for us is the TB prevalence declined by 40% in the intervention arm within three years only, which is a very remarkable achievement because we haven't seen such reduction in such short period in another setting. We found that we could reduce mortality by around a half, which was a pretty remarkable effect. We have seen many patients in our program who really hide from us whenever we go to their house and knock the door, they disappear because they don't want to be seen as TB patients. Historically, one of the explanations for tuberculosis was that there was some sort of weakness in the family and that would be a reason to conceal that from your community. People who live with TB were seen as those who are weak, those who are poor and those who can transfer the disease to the next generation. So it's highly stigmatized disease in Vietnam. And that can be quite counterproductive because it can prevent people from coming forward for screening and mean that people might conceal that they have TB and might not want to go and receive the full treatment. COVID appeared in Vietnam first in 23rd of January 2020. I still remember that day that there was such a chaos in our country and we have gone through four waves of the COVID outbreak in Vietnam and it's really difficult for us because we have to work with patients who have respiratory symptoms who are likely to have the COVID. And in our work we have to conduct several tests such as to ask patients to produce wisdom or to blow strongly to our machine which may spread the virus if they have COVID-19. So it's very dangerous because of COVID we have to stop our study activities and only maintain the care and support for patients who were already on our program. I think COVID has taught us how we can be much more ambitious about efforts to combat tuberculosis. Within Vietnam you've seen a very strong national approach to prevent COVID transmission. In contrast, tuberculosis is largely accepted as a part of life. In order to stop TB for everybody we need to be really proactive in trying to screen for and treat TB. One of the challenges is though that that requires addressing this major problem of stigma and in order to address the problem of stigma it requires people to see the disease not as being something that they should be blamed for but something that they can be cured from because we have effective treatments. If we can take the same approach and the same proactive effort with tuberculosis then it may be possible to bring down the rates of TB very rapidly. I hope that if the country could do a massive screening and treatment countrywide then even in the next 20 years maybe our new generation even do not know what tuberculosis is because we could be able to eliminate the disease.