Geneva: A new, untreatable form of tuberculosis is striking up to 30,000 people a year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday, and warned it could spark an "apocalyptic scenario" if unchecked.
The United Nations agency appealed for $2.15 billion (Dh7.8 billion) to combat drug-resistant TB under a programme which it said could save up to 134,000 lives over two years.
Extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB), a form virtually immune to antibiotics, has been reported in 37 countries in all regions since emerging in 2006, according to the WHO.
"There is somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000, we roughly estimate, cases of extensive drug resistant TB each year," Paul Nunn, coordinator of WHO's Stop TB Department, told a briefing.
"Ultimately, to face down this epidemic, we need new tools - we need new drugs, we need new diagnostics," he added.
The recent case of an American man with XDR-TB, who travelled abroad and triggered an international health scare, highlighted the potential risks of rapid spread.
XDR-TB cases are particularly difficult to treat, and a patient could infect other people for years, according to Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's Stop TB Department.
Time bomb
"That is the big threat here. If you have more and more of these cases, you will automatically magnify the problem by having transmission going on to other individuals. Once they become infected they are sort of a time bomb," Raviglione said.
"If this is kept unchecked and goes on, then you may also see an apocalyptic scenario where the present epidemic of TB is replaced by an epidemic of TB which is now fully resistant to everything," he added.
Some 8.8 million people each year develop normal TB, a bacterial infection that usually attacks the lungs and which kills 1.6 million people a year, according to the WHO.
About 450,000 get a multi-resistant form each year.
