JOHANNESBURG: The World Health Organisation has declared tuberculosis an emergency in Africa after cases of the killer disease tripled in countries with high rates of HIV and doubled on the continent as a whole since 1990.The declaration was made late on Thursday in a resolution adopted by African health ministers at the WHO’s regional committee’s 55th session, held in the Mozambican capital of Maputo.

"The declaration has been taken that TB is to be declared an emergency in Africa," said Mario Raviglione, the WHO’s Stop TB department director. "The resolution urges among other things, immediate measures by member states to implement emergency strategies and to intensify actions in the fight against the disease," he told AFP from Maputo. TB, a bacterial lung disease, is the world’s second largest infectious killer after HIV/AIDS, causing an estimated two million deaths every year, according to WHO figures, more than half-a-million of these occurring in Africa.

It is also the largest cause of death among people living with HIV/AIDS on the continent. In African countries with high rates of HIV and AIDS the number of tuberculosis cases are rocketing as opposed to the rest of the world, where rates have remained fairly constant or are even on the decline.

Raviglione said that a range of actions had been decided on by the meeting of the health ministers, based on a two-year "blueprint" developed by the global Stop TB partnership which comprises more than 400 organisations joining the fight against the lung infection. The "blueprint" for the fight against the disease was finalised in Addis Ababa in May, Raviglione said, and this year and will require 1.1 billion dollars in new funding.

The Maputo declaration called for the rapid improvement of TB detection and treatment in combination with anti-retroviral drugs for AIDS treatment, the expansion of national partnerships and recruitment of more trained staff and halting a "brain-drain from the continent." "This declaration will help us on two major fronts: first it gives us a tool to negotiate (the seriousness of the disease) in endemic countries; and secondly it will help in donor countries as a weapon to mobilise additional resources," Raviglione said.

"The fact that the ministers agreed that TB should be declared a health emergency in Africa shows that there is real political commitment to fight it," added Patrick Bertrand, spokesman for the Massive Effort Campaign organisation which fights TB, malaria and HIV/AIDS across the globe. Among some of the constraints cited in Maputo in fighting tuberculosis were the financial support that African countries and donors alike were giving to TB control.

Of nine countries in Africa with the highest TB rates, only Ethiopia and Mozambique had control programs that were close to being fully-funded. "It is tragic that this disease has not been brought under control, because I am living proof that TB can be effectively treated and cured," said Nobel laureate former Archbishop Desmond Tutu.