Tuberculosis can be eradicated by 2045: the experts

Noting the huge social and economic costs of inaction, they said there was a need to improve screening, treatment and public awareness to reduce the more than 10 million cases registered each year.

Chronic preventable and largely treatable chronic lung disease if detected in time, TB is the leading cause of infectious mortality of our time, causing more than 1.6 million deaths each year.

"It's huge and the resulting economic burden for developed and developing countries is enormous," Eric Goosby, UN special envoy for the disease, told AFP.

"It's not rocket science, it's really common sense, we need to launch a new prevention strategy."

Tuberculosis has existed for millennia and is latent in about a quarter of the world's population.

Although the number of people killed each year by HIV / AIDS and malaria is virtually the same, there has been no new TB vaccine available in commerce for a century.

The disease currently receives only about 10% of the funds allocated to AIDS research.

A team of experts from 13 countries, writing in The Lancet, said that funding for research and development is expected to quadruple, to reach about $ 3 billion a year, if one wants to effectively fight against disease.

In India alone, where one-third of all TB deaths occur worldwide, improved access to treatment and targeted targeting of at-risk communities could reduce the number of deaths by nearly one-third with spending annual $ 290 million.

This compares with $ 32 billion annually in economic losses – including treatment costs and lost productivity – attributed to TB.

"The real key is that we will need a lot more new research and tools," said Paula Fujiwara, Scientific Director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

"Even if we use the tools we have today, that will not be enough." The goal is to end TB, but the current decline is only 1.5 to 2.0 per cent. year, "she told AFP.

The Lancet study indicates that even if currently available treatments were administered to 90% of people with TB, 800,000 people would still die because of their ineffectiveness and diagnostic gaps.

The battle of tuberculosis turns

A series of breakthroughs over the last few months have given hope to patients.

In October, a new treatment for drug-resistant TB strains healed 80% of people in Belarus. Treatment has since been repeated in other high-incidence countries, with similar results.

A month earlier, drug giant GlaxoSmithKline had unveiled a study showing that a new vaccine was effective in 54% of trial participants.

In parallel, doctors claim that a new screening method could help reduce the 240,000 deaths of children under five years old caused by TB each year.

Goosby said the trials should continue to drive a chain of production of new treatments against the disease.

"The inevitability is that we will need new drugs as the disease evolves," he said. "We should, as a global health response, anticipate and wait for drug resistance and continue the work."

According to the Lancet study, reducing the number of deaths from TB to less than 200,000 a year would cost about $ 10 billion a year.