WHO declares TB emergency in Africa

The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Committee for Africa has declared tuberculosis (TB) an emergency in the African region as the number of new cases have more than quadrupled, killing more than half a million people each year.

The declaration was made in a resolution adopted at the end of the Committee's fifty-fifth session in Maputo, Mozambique. It urges member states in the African region to commit more human and financial resources to anti-TB programmes and scale up collaborative interventions to fight the co-epidemic of TB and HIV.

'Despite commendable efforts by countries and partners to control tuberculosis, impact on incidence has not been significant and the epidemic has now reached unprecedented proportions,' said WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis Gomes Sambo. 'Urgent and extraordinary actions must be taken, or else the situation will only get worse and the TB targets in the Abuja Declaration, and the Millennium Development Goals, will not be achieved.'

Globally, TB is second only to HIV/AIDS as a cause of illness and death in adults, accounting for nearly 9m cases of active disease and 2m deaths every year.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, African countries like Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi were among the first to apply what became the global TB control strategy now known as DOTS. But in the past 15 years, TB incidence rates have soared in the region, due largely to the link with HIV/AIDS, poverty and weak health systems.

In the other four WHO regions of the world, TB trends are either stable or in decline and are on track to reach the MDG targets of halving TB prevalence and deaths by 2015.