A tireless advocate for people infected with both tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia and the manager of the national TB control programme in India has won a prestigious new UN health prize for their efforts to transform control of the debilitating, but curable disease that kills some 5,000 people a day.
Winstone Zulu from Zambia and L S Chauhan from India became the first winners of the 'The Stop TB Partnership Kochon Prize', inaugurated this year by the Partnership, a network of more than 500 organisations whose secretariat is housed at the UN agency World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva.
The Kochon Foundation was set up in 1973 by the late Chong-Kun Lee, chairman of the Chong Kun Dang Pharmaceutical Corp., one of the first TB drug manufacturers in South Korea.
Zulu himself was cured of tuberculosis, although all of his four brothers died of the disease. He is a co-founder of Kara-Kabwe Programmes for Kara Counselling, a provider of HIV/AIDS counselling in Zambia, and was co-president of TBTV.org, one of the first global organisations of people with TB and HIV/AIDS.
Dr Chauhan is deputy director-general (tuberculosis) and programme manager of the National TB Control Programme. Since 2002 he has overseen the rapid expansion of the DOTS TB-control program in India, a remarkable accomplishment in the country that bears