Teh case of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste

The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste was a Portuguese colony for 400 years, and was under Indonesian occupation for 25 years. After the population’s overwhelming vote for inde-pendence in August 1999, militia supported by the Indonesian military destroyed 70% of the country’s infrastructure; several thousand people were killed; and hundreds of thousands spent months as refugees in the mountains or outside the country. Following this unrest, the United Nations administered the country until independence in May 2002. Despite this com-plex emergency, the National Tuberculosis Programme (NTP) was established quickly and had one of the highest rates of new smear-positive tuberculosis (TB) in Asia (Fig. 1): the treatment success rate of over 80%