The World Health Organisation has unveiled a new strategy to fight tuberculosis, an infectious disease that kills about 1.7 million people each year

Reuters:

The strategy, which aims to expand existing treatment programmes, improve diagnosis and prevent co-infection with HIV/AIDS, underpins the WHO's $56 billion global plan launched in January to halve TB prevalence and death rates and save 14 million lives by 2015.

"The new Stop TB Strategy injects new energies to make efforts more comprehensive and effective," Dr Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB Department, said in a statement.

Patients with TB are treated with the DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short-course) programme -- a multi-level approach that involves government commitment, patient surveillance and drug treatment.

The programme is running in 183 countries, but multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), particularly in eastern Europe, and co-infection in patients with HIV/AIDS in Africa present new problems.

More than 260,000 people who died of TB in 2004 were co-infected with HIV.

"We must involve a much broader array of actors in TB control and adapt DOTS to HIV co-infection, MDR-TB and other special challenges if we're going to achieve 2015 targets of the Global Plan ..," said Dr Marcos Espinal, executive secretary of the Stop TB Partnership.

The strategy outlined in The Lancet medical journal also highlights the need for more research into new treatments and vaccine and the strengthening of local health systems in poor countries which are hardest hit by TB.

The bulk of patients with TB live in the most populous countries in Asia. Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan account for 48 percent of the new cases that are diagnosed each year.

Infection rates in Africa are also high.

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