The rate of tuberculosis (TB) infection is falling so slowly that it would take more than 1,000 years to eradicate the disease, a top health official said Tuesday. The annual World Health Organization (WHO) report on TB, presented in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was highly pessimistic on several fronts, including an expected $1.6 billion deficit in funding needed to fight the disease this year, a doubling of the reported cases of people who have both TB and HIV, and an increase in the number of cases of drug-resistant TB. The WHO report estimates that 9.27 million people had TB in 2007, up slightly from 9.24 million in 2006. However, the per capita decline of less than 1 percent annually has continued for the “last several years,” said WHO anti-TB director Mario Raviglione, and it would take millennia to eradicate TB at that rate. “We have a situation with very little progress, particularly in Africa and eastern and central Europe,” said Tido von Schoen-Angerer, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders, who was attending the TB conference in Rio de Janeiro. “There is no room anywhere in this report for congratulations.” --MORE
