Agence France Presse

Headline: TB twice as likely to strike China's countryside than cities
Date: March 25, 2003 Tuesday 1:25 AM Eastern Time
Dateline: Beijing, March 25

Eighty percent of China tuberculosis (TB) sufferers live in rural areas where there is a much higher risk of contracting the disease than in urban centres, state media reported Tuesday.

In rural areas living conditions are poor and there are health and nutritional problems, insufficient money for health care, and lack of knowledge about the illness, the China Daily reported.

"TB has become one of the main diseases that make lots of rural families fall into serious poverty in the country, which has 4.5 million TB patients," said Mao Qun'an, a health ministry deputy director, the paper reported.

Among the infected, 1.5 million have active tuberculosis and run a high risk of spreading the TB bacillus to healthy people through daily contact.

The prevalence rate differs greatly between various areas of China.

For example, in the west, where most of China's poverty-stricken population lives, the prevalence is 1.7 times that of the north.

Some 63.8 percent of China's TB patients are aged between 15 and 59 which results in a heavy loss of labor that adversely affects the gross domestic product, experts said.

And more than 60 percent of rural patients leave hospital before fully recovering because they cannot afford to pay for treatment, said Wang Lushen, deputy director of the China National Health Economics Institute.

That has led to a drug resistance rate among TB patients of 27.8 percent. The transmission of drug-resistant TB bacillus will make new patients drug-resistant from the outset, experts warned.

To fight the problem, China is using funds from international organizations, other countries and various levels of the government to implement an international TB-control strategy, known as DOTS.

Under the plan, patients take medicine under the observation of a doctor to ensure contagious patients receive proper treatment to prevent the disease spreading.

By 2010, the program is expected to cover more than 95 percent of China's counties.

China has the second largest number of TB patients in the world after India.

The death rate from the disease has been steadily descending, but official statistics indicate that 120,000 people still perish each year from it.

The World Health Organization said Monday the battle against TB has progressed well in China, with 1.3 million people treated under DOTS over the past 10 years and 90 percent of them cured.