World TB Day 2002 - In the News

Press Association
Headline: Dobson Calls for More Spending on TB Care
Date: March 22, 2002
Byline: Sarah Westcott, Health Correspondent, PA News

Former Health Secretary and MP Frank Dobson today led a call on the NHS to increase resources for tuberculosis care and treatment in London.

This follows the release of figures that show TB cases have more than doubled in the city in the past 15 years, and that TB in Britain continues to increase.

In a release of a speech he was due to give at the World Health Organisation's Stop TB and TB Alert event today to mark World TB Day which is on Sunday, Mr Dobson said: "In Britain, TB used to be a great scourge. It was virtually wiped out. "We need to make the same targeted effort to stop its present comeback."

Brent in north London heads the list with 297 cases last year, an increase of 80% since 1998.

The other London hotspot, Newham, showed a drop in cases from 290 in 2000 to 249 last year.

Paul Sommerfeld, chair of the charity TB Alert, said: "The Government and health authorities must find the relatively small sums of money needed to ensure there are sufficient TB nurses.

"They are the frontline control against this deadly infectious disease." Mr Dobson warned that TB is re-asserting itself as a major killer on a global scale.

He said that WHO figures show that TB killed two million people in 2001 and kept hundreds of millions of others in poverty, draining 12 billion dollars (#8.4 billion) every year from the world's poorest communities.

"In southern Africa, most people with AIDS die of TB.

"(Chancellor) Gordon Brown and (International Development Secretary) Clare Short are really leading the way in support for the new global fund against TB, AIDS and Malaria. We want the other rich countries to follow."

World TB Day is on 24 March each year, commemorating the announcement on that day in 1882 by Robert Koch of his discovery of the bacteria that causes the disease.

Figures for the London borough of Camden, which includes Frank Dobson's constituency, show that in 1998 the number of cases was 103.

Other seriously affected boroughs are Ealing (241 cases last year), Hackney (177), Haringey (158), Lambeth (137), and Tower Hamlets (128).

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