Drug-resistant strains of Tuberculosis are posing the greatest threat to Europe since the Second World War, according to UN and Red Cross health officials.
Drug-resistant strains of the disease have been detected just beyond the European Union's borders in former Soviet Union-sphere nations, world health officials said in Geneva today.
Countries causing concern include the three Baltic states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Among others are Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Of 450,000 cases in Europe and central Asia annually, an estimated 70,000 are new strains.
Markuu Niskala, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, warned that the resistance shown by new strains of TB was "without doubt the most alarming TB situation on the continent since the Second World War."
Tuberculosis , a respiratory illness spread by coughing and sneezing, is the world's deadliest curable infectious disease.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 1.7 million people died from TB in 2004. Of the 20 countries in the world with the highest rates of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, 14 are in "the European region," according to a recent global survey by the WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 15 per cent of all TB cases currently detected in Europe are multi-drug resistant. European countries also have the highest rate of extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis known as XDR-TB.
AP