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TB threat poses danger to Europe

Infection Control Monitor, October 13, 2006

The European Union (EU) needs to do more to fight a dangerous outbreak of a more deadly form of tuberculosis among its neighbors, world health officials said last week. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis are lurking just beyond the E. U.'s border in Baltic countries, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, reported the Associated Press.

"The drug resistance that we are seeing now is without doubt the most alarming tuberculosis situation on the continent since World War II. Our message to EU leaders is wake up, do not delay, do not let this problem get further out of hand," said Markku Niskala, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

About 450,000 people get infected with tuberculosis each year in the Europe region, a tuberculosis control medical officer for the World Health Organization said. Nearly 70,000 of these contract strains are of the easily-spread respiratory disease that resists the two main drugs used to treat tuberculosis, raising the likelihood that the disease could lead to epidemics in Western Europe on the scale of that seen in the 1940s, according to news reports.

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