The introduction of new rapid diagnostic tools for tuberculosis (TB) and the promising TB drugs pipeline together with the development of a new World Health Organization Strategy post 2015 allows new discussions on how to direct TB control. The European Respiratory Society's European Forum for TB Innovation was created to stimulate discussion on how to best take advantage of old and new opportunities, and advances, to improve TB control and eventually progress towards the elimination of TB.While TB control is aimed at reducing the incidence of TB by early diagnosis and treatment of infectious cases of TB, TB elimination requires focus on sterilising the pool of latently infected individuals, from which future TB cases would be generated.This manuscript describes the three core components that are necessary to implement the elimination strategy fully. 1) Improve diagnosis of latent TB infected individuals. 2) Improve regimens to treat latent TB infection. 3) ensure public health commitment to make both 1) and 2) possible. Old and new evidence is critically described, focusing on the European commitment to reach elimination and on the innovative experiences and best practices available. @ERSpublications Diagnosis and treatment of latent TB infection is the core intervention to reach elimination

SummarySector-wide approaches (SWAps) are currently implemented in several, predominantly highly donordependent low-income countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. SWAp intends to enhance health sector performance, especially efficiency, effectiveness, coherence and sustainability. SWAps have been criticized for not being able to produce tangible results and the credibility of a SWAp would increase substantially if such results in terms of health services outputs could be demonstrated. We argue that the monitoring of tuberculosis within the SWAp reviews held to assess sector performance deserves a higher profile. Tuberculosis constitutes in the first place and one of the major public health problems in most of the countries, where SWAps have been introduced, but provided that the programme is integral part of the sector policy and financial management, the indicators used for monitoring TB control programmes can also be used as excellent proxies for monitoring overall health sector performance.

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