Tackling TB

The World Health Organization on Tuesday unveiled a new plan to tackle multi-drug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis at a WHO Regional Committee conference in Azerbaijan.

The public health group described "MDR-TB" as spreading through Europe at "an alarming rate," noting that such cases had increased "sixfold between 2008 and 2009," according to a press release Wednesday.

"TB is an old disease that never went away, and now it is evolving with a vengeance," said Zsuzsanna Jakab, the WHO's Regional Director for Europe. "Now it is evolving with a vengeance and we have to find new weapons to fight it."

The $5 billion (3.66 billion euro) plan calls for better collaboration on more effective drugs, vaccines and testing and sets ambitious goals to reduce European TB by the end of 2015.

"The new consolidated action plan has been developed with unprecedented consultation, including with patients and communities suffering from the disease," Hans Kluge, a WHO special representative, said in a statement. "This problem is a man-made phenomenon resulting from inadequate treatment or poor airborne infection control and we need wide involvement to tackle the damage that humankind has done."

Eastern Europe highly susceptible

The WHO noted that the nine countries that have the highest rates of new MDR-TB patients, including Azerbaijan, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine, are located in Europe. Almost 12 percent of newly diagnosed TB patients have the MDR form.

Beyond less developed countries on Europe's eastern fringes, the WHO also noted that not only are the lesser developed regions of Europe susceptible to TB.

"For example, London, United Kingdom has the highest TB rate of any capital city in western Europe: nearly 3,500 cases annually, an increase of about 30 percent in the last 10 years," the organization said in a statement. "MDR-TB in London doubled between 2005 and 2009, and now represents nearly 2 percent of all cases."

In December 2010, The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, published a new study outlining a vast spike in TB cases in the British capital.

"It's prevailing today in certain sections of the community that replicate conditions in Victorian London," said Alimuddin Zumla, a professor of microbiology at University College London in an interview with Deutsche Welle last year. "Most of the TB occurs in areas where there's deprivation and poverty, and that's where all the homeless are. So we've set up an endemic cycle of transmission."

Better than nothing

Other experts suggested that this new plan was necessary but may not be enough.

Ruth McNerney, a senior lecturer in pathogen biology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the Associated Press that WHO's plan is "overambitious."

"If we don't solve this soon, we could end up with so much drug-resistant tuberculosis that it will be like being back in the Victorian age when there were no good treatments," she said.

TB currently kills around 1.7 million people a year. Cases of MDR-TB are increasing with about 440,000 new patients every year around the world. In Europe, there are about 80,000 new cases of TB each year.

Author: Cyrus Farivar (AP)

Editor: Sean Sinico