Around 4,700 people still die from tuberculosis every day, the World Health Organization said Thursday in its annual report on the disease. And while death rates are leveling off, multiple drug-resistant TB strains remain a huge threat.
The WHO noted in the report that all of the 1.7 million tuberculosis deaths that occur around the world each year are preventable, because the infection is treatable with six months on antibiotics, if caught early enough.
But the disease is still a major scourge in Asia and Africa, where many residents don't receive proper treatment.
India carries the highest burden of TB, with 2 million new cases diagnosed in 2009. It's estimated that as many as half of India's population is carrying the contagious airborne bacteria that cause TB.
China also carries a huge TB burden, with 1.3 million cases diagnosed a year, followed by South Africa with some 490,000.
The "Global Tuberculosis Control" report noted that the incidence of tuberculosis was stable or falling in 2009 in all of the 22 countries that have the highest burden of the disease, except South Africa.
Still, the global death rate has declined by 35 per cent since 1990, with six million lives being saved a year compared to 1995, according to the report.
However, the director of the WHO's Stop TB unit, Mario Raviglione, warned that despite improvements in the quality of TB care since 1995, the progress is fragile.
"At this pace it will take millennia to get rid of TB," he told journalists.
Raviglione noted that "India is the country that has seen the most spectacular increase in doing the rights things in TB control." He noted that there's been a big shift from sparse detection and treatment 10 years ago to nationwide coverage today.
The biggest TB challenge now is posed by multiple drug-resistant strains called MDR-TB. These cases have emerged because patients do not always take the expensive first-line drugs as directed.
MDR-TB infected an estimated 440,000 people in 2008 and is thought to be most widespread in China, India and Russia. But the scope of the problem is difficult to grasp, since it's thought that only a fraction of cases are reported to WHO.
MDR-TB patients need a complex treatment regimen that lasts from 18 months to 24 months, often with hospitalization. The report estimates that only 10,000 MDR-TB patients receive this correct treatment because patients in many countries aren't properly tested for drug resistance.
