GOVERNMENTS and the drugs industry must spend $500 million (£300m) a year if they are to stop the resurgence of tuberculosis turning into a global catastrophe, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday.
The lung disease is expected to kill 30 million people, most of them in the developing world, over the next 10 years unless WHO guidelines are followed the United Nations body said.
In a report on the global threat from TB. WHO said three million people died from the disease in 1995, more than at the peak of epidemics in the late 19th century when modern antibiotics were unavailable.
"The TB epidemic is worse now than at any other time in human history," said Dr Arata Kochi, director of WHO's global TB programme. TB is the only disease WHO has ever classified as a global emergency.
WHO executives said the rise of drug resistant TB strains meant the disease was breaking out of traditional strongholds in Africa and Asia to threaten the developed world.
These strains have appeared because many patients and doctors tail to complete treatments. This allows some bacteria to survive and become drug immune. Outbreaks of resistant strains have been reported all over the developed world.
"If that continues to happen the world is going to return to the days where there were no TB medicines and no cure for tuberculosis," Dr Kochi said.
A practice called Directly Observed Treatment Shortcourse (DOTS) is the only realistic method of halting the spread of drug resistant TB, the organisation said. It involves little new science but relies on tight control of a patient's treatment.
The study found that in areas not applying DOTS only about four to five of every 10 patients were being cured of TB. With DOTS the numbers rose to nine out of 10.
Drug resistant TB is already difficult to cure. Drugs to treat normal TB under the DOTS scheme cost about $11 (£7) a patient, WHO said, while medicines for drug resistant TB can cost up to $250,000 a patient and still offer no hope of a cure.
If Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria, Zaire, Mexico and Brazil all had DOTS fully in place, the number of worldwide TB cases could be cut by 75 per cent. WHO estimates.