Achieving universal social protection for people with tuberculosis.

As we mark World TB Day 2024, we take this opportunity to reflect on the 2023 UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting (HLM) on the fight against tuberculosis-a milestone in the commitment towards a more coordinated, comprehensive approach to end tuberculosis globally. The UN HLM declaration on the fight against tuberculosis includes a specific pledge that all people with tuberculosis should receive a social benefits package to mitigate financial hardship. However, it is not known how this specific pledge will be realised and through which concrete actions. The use of the term financial hardship instead of WHO's key End TB Strategy indicator of catastrophic costs might prove challenging for robust evaluation of both the socioeconomic impact of tuberculosis and the effectiveness of socioeconomic support strategies to mitigate this impact. Moreover, in contrast to the financial pledges made for biomedical interventions, there was an absence of explicit investment in social protection. Such investments are imperative to facilitate successful expansion of social protection to meet the needs of people with tuberculosis and their households. Successful expansion of social protection is also dependent on political commitment and protected budgets from relevant stakeholders, including across government ministries. These strategies will help to ensure that the commitments on social protection made in the UN HLM declaration are turned into tangible actions with measurable effects.

Activating attachments enhances heart rate variability.

Although activating mental representations of attachment figures is beneficial for psychological health, there is a paucity of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. We investigated how priming attachment figures may modulate parasympathetic stress response. Participants (N = 62) with varying degrees of attachment security underwent a cold pressor test, and then imagined an attachment or non-attachment figure. Heart rate variability was assessed throughout the study. Participants with low avoidant attachment levels displayed less negative affect and greater heart rate variability following the attachment prime than those who imagined the non-attachment prime. This beneficial effect of attachment priming was not observed in participants with high avoidant attachment levels. These findings highlight that activating attachment representations can enhance the parasympathetic stress response in people with secure attachment styles, and provides one explanation for the psychological benefits of attachment proximity.