Europe told to wake up to TB threat

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

GENEVA (Reuters) - The European Union is not doing enough to fight a dangerous outbreak of tuberculosis among its neighbours which poses a major threat to the continent, health agencies said on Tuesday.

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 Organisation (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 Markku Niskala, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

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