AP Features, November 2nd, 2006
The Netherlands pledged Thursday to invest euro30 million ($38 million) to fight tuberculosis amid concerns about a deadly, drug-resistant new form of the disease, three nonprofit groups said.
The investment, to be handed out over four years, was the largest that any country has made to TB research, said the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, one of three foundations to benefit from the grant.
The TB alliance will get euro8 million ($10 million) for drug research. The Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation will receive euro18.4 million ($23.4 million), while the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics will have euro4 million ($5 million) to develop better TB tests.
The announcement was made during the Union World Conference on Lung Health in Paris.
The respiratory illness, spread by coughing and sneezing, is the world's deadliest curable infectious disease. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.7 million people die from TB every year.
A new form of TB has emerged that is virtually incurable with existing antibiotics.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization surveyed laboratories on six continents from 2000 to 2004 and found that one in 50 TB cases around the world is resistant not only to the usual first-choice TB treatments, but also to many medications that represent the last line of defense.
That classifies the disease as extensively drug resistant TB, or XDR.
XDR-TB has highlighted the need for more research on the disease. The TB drugs prescribed today are more than 40 years old, and they require a 6- to 9-month treatment regimen. The most common TB test was introduced more than a century ago, and it takes weeks to get lab confirmation.
