CAPE TOWN, Nov 12: Fifty years after it was thought to have been contained, tuberculosis (TB) has re-emerged as a ruthless killer claiming a life every 20 seconds, a global lung health conference has heard.

Though treatable, the disease kills some 1.5 million people out of about nine million new cases diagnosed annually, the gathering of 3,000 experts from 100 countries heard in Cape Town over the past five days.

But as TB gains momentum, drugs to treat it with are more than 40 years old, the test method used in poor countries was developed over 100 years ago and the only available vaccine is approaching the century mark.

As drug resistance spreads and the threat of an untreatable TB strain grows, the introduction of new diagnostic and treatment tools remain years off.

“It is a scandal that this disease has not been given the proper attention,” Nils Billo, executive director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease told journalists as the conference drew to a close on Monday.

“And why has it not been given the proper attention? Because it is a disease that affects the poor. The pharmaceutical industry does not see necessarily a big profit ... in developing tuberculosis drugs.” Jerald Sadoff, president of the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation, told delegates that TB was thought to have been brought under control 50 years ago.

Today, a third of the world’s 40 million people with HIV/AIDS are also believed to have TB and up to half of AIDS deaths were attributed to the lung ailment.

The conference called for closer collaboration between national AIDS and TB programmes.

In 2005, only seven per cent of TB patients globally were tested for HIV and less than one in 200 people living with HIV were screened for TB.

“We are missing vital opportunities to offer better care and prevent unnecessary deaths among people living with HIV and among TB patients,” said Alasdair Reid, HIV-TB adviser for the United Nations AIDS programme.

Participants heard that a new, untreatable strain of TB posed a serious public health threat as incidents of extreme-drug resistant (XDR) TB continued to spread.

Of about two billion people infected with TB world-wide, about 450,000 had a drug-resistant strain.

To curtail the spread of the disease, Billo appealed for a greater focus on infection control by separating patients complaining of a persistent cough from others in waiting rooms – many of whom were HIV-positive and more susceptible to TB.—AFP