RIO DE JANEIRO - Health experts say the rate of tuberculosis infection is falling at such a slow rate it would take more than 1,000 years to wipe the disease out.
The World Health Organization's annual report on TB presented in Rio de Janeiro was full of pessimistic points. Among them -- an expected $1.6 billion gap 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 survey estimates that 9.27 million people around the globe had TB in 2007 - the latest year for figures.
That is slightly up from 9.24 million in 2006.
That amounts to a per capita rate of 139 per 100,000 people globally, the report states.
That pace, a drop of less than one per cent a year, has continued for the "last several years," said Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB program.
Tido von Schoen-Angerer, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders, who was attending the conference, said it would take millennia to wipe out the disease at that rate.
"We have a situation with very little progress, particularly in Africa and Eastern and Central Europe," he said. "There is no room anywhere in this report for congratulations."
The number of TB cases linked to HIV in 2007 -- 1.4 million -- was double that in 2006, a jump officials attributed to better reporting of such cases in more countries, particularly Africa, where 79 per cent of the cases were reported.
In 2007, 1.3 million people died from TB, while another 465,000 people who had both TB and HIV died.
Multiple-drug-resistant cases of TB also rose in 2007 to 500,000. Such cases are more difficult to treat and have a higher rate of deaths. Raviglione said a TB conference in China early next month will focus on these cases.
Aggravating the fight against TB is the global financial crisis.
Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the UN-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said funding for programs to fight TB will fall $1.6 billion short in 2009, a gap he estimates will reach at least $4 billion in 2010.
"The crisis is severely affecting developing nations," he said. "But countries should realize health costs are an investment for development and not just a strain on budgets."
Asia registered the most TB cases in 2007, with 55 per cent, while Africa had 31 per cent. Among countries, India had the most cases with two million, China had 1.3 million and Indonesia 530,000.
