The second edition of European Union Standards for Tuberculosis Care (ESTC) is now available. The ESTC is a user-friendly guide for the optimal diagnosis, treatment and prevention of tuberculosis (TB). The ESTC are tailored to the European setting and available in all EU/EEA languages. ECDC and the European Respiratory Society (ERS) jointly developed the standards.

The ESTC includes 21 standards in the areas of diagnosis, treatment, HIV and co-morbidities and public health and prevention. The ESTC were updated to integrate evidence-based recommendations from recently published international guidelines and policy documents. The update was conducted as a joint endeavour with ERS, consulting experts from international societies and organisations, national TB programmes, civil society and affected communities.

The goal of the ESTC is to support public health experts, clinicians and healthcare programmes in TB prevention and control, bridging current gaps in case management of TB in the European Union/European Economic Area and thus contributing to ending TB in the region as envisioned in UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.3.

On 17 August 2018 the World Health Organization (WHO) released a rapid communication document, ‘Key changes to treatment of multidrug- and rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis’. In the communication, WHO recommends a revised grouping and ranking of the drugs used to treat multidrug-resistant TB. This revision affects the EU-specific requirements of Standard 12 included in the ESTC, which has been addressed in ERS correspondence ‘European Union standard for tuberculosis care on treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis following publication of the new World Health Organization recommendations’.

Download the ESTC