Tuberculosis poses as threat to Europe

Geneva: The European Union is not doing enough to fight a dangerous outbreak of tuberculosis among its neighbors which poses a major threat to the continent, health agencies said.

About 450,000 people get infected with tuberculosis each year in the Europe region, including Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to Pierpaolo de Colombani, a tuberculosis control medical officer for the World Health Organization (WHO).

Nearly 70,000 of these contract strains of the easily-spread respiratory ailment that resist the two main tuberculosis drugs, raising the likelihood that the disease could lead to epidemics in Western Europe on the scale of that seen in the 1940s.

"The drug resistance that we are seeing now is without doubt the most alarming tuberculosis situation on the continent since World War Two," said head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Markku Niskala.

"Our message to EU leaders is: wake up, do not delay, do not let this problem get further out of hand," Niskala said.

The explosion in multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, rooted in patients not taking the full course of their drugs, has meant that Europe is "nowhere near to being on track" to meet global targets on controlling the disease, said Michael Luhan of the Red Cross and Red Crescent federation.

The WHO has estimated that donors need to nearly triple spending levels to $56 billion over 10 years to halt the global spread of tuberculosis.

Luhan, the federation's tuberculosis coordinator for Europe and Central Asia, said European Union states had become too complacent about the disease in recent years, despite high rates of infection in neighbors including Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Belarus and Turkey.

"Tuberculosis has always been low on the EU agenda," Luhan told journalists in Geneva, where health experts are this week meeting on ways to confront Europe's tuberculosis threat.

EU expansion alone will multiply the region's tuberculosis exposure, he said.

Migration from Eastern Europe and Central Asia will also raise risks of drug-resistant strains spreading in cities such as London, where tuberculosis infection rates have been steadily climbing over the last decade.

Some countries, including Latvia, have also been found to have cases of extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis, which does not respond to at least three of the six existing classes of second-line tuberculosis drugs, though de Colombani said the exact extent of this threat was not yet known.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Medecins du Monde and more than 20 other health agencies and non-governmental groups said European governments needed to intensify their tuberculosis fight.

"The hottest zones of drug-resistant tuberculosis are all around the periphery of the European Union," said Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB division.

"Investment in tuberculosis control must reflect the real emergency we are facing and be placed higher on the European agenda, especially in donor countries," he said.