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The World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday launched a five-year global
plan to fight tuberculosis, a curable disease that kills four people every minute.
The air-borne disease, which attacks the lungs and brings a slow and painful death to its victims, is most prevalent in the poorest regions, including Afghanistan and vast refugee camps in Pakistan.
The 9.3-billion-dollar plan aims to reverse the spread of the TB epidemic that claimed 2 million lives last year, mostly in Africa and Asia, where it is especially deadly for those already weakened by HIV/AIDS. Because TB is also on the rise in industrialized countries, boosting overseas aid to fight it is "not only the right thing to do but also an act of enlightened self-interest," said WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland.
"Investing in global health issues like TB makes sense because improving health is a concrete measurable way of reducing poverty and inequity, both at a country and global level."
Improving existing public health programmes to fight the disease with drug treatments for as little as 10 dollars per patient would mean "22 million people would be cured of TB and 16 million lives would be saved by 2005", she said.
The global plan, called the Stop TB Partnership, includes more than 120 groups, including the Open Society Institute of financier and philanthropist George Soros, who funded pogrammes against multi- drug resistant TB in Russian prisons.
"By treating cases now and preventing future transmission of the TB bacillus, countries can avoid much more costly interventions in the future," he said.
The programme's targets are the detection of 70 per cent of TB infections, and the cure of 85 per cent of those cases, by 2005.
While governments, international bodies and other donors would pay for more than half of the project, a funding gap of 4.5 billion dollars remains.
Twenty-two countries account for almost 80 per cent of global tuberculosis cases, the World Bank and WHO said.
They are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar (Burma), Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
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