London: The fight to curb the global tuberculosis epidemic has slowed to a crawl, threatening efforts to control the disease, the World Health Organization says in a report.

India and China have the most cases, followed by Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, the report says.

The worldwide rate of TB infection has been declining since it peaked several years ago. But between 2005 and 2006, the rate of new cases fell by less than 1 percent. Ideally, health officials want to see yearly decreases of 5-7 percent.

At the same time, WHO said last month that drug-resistant TB is growing faster than ever.

Independent health experts criticized the WHO's TB policy as too passive, and urged a more proactive strategy. WHO conceded that the most recent decline in the overall infection rate less than 1 per cent "is very modest, and is not as fast as we would like it to be", Dr Marcos Espinal, executive secretary of the organization's Stop TB Partnership, said yesterday.

"Without new tools, we will not be able to break the back of this epidemic," he said, citing a lack of vaccines, drugs that need updating, obsolete diagnostic tests and overwhelmed health systems as contributing to the slowdown in eradication.

In 2006, there were an estimated 9.2 million new tuberculosis cases and 1.5 million deaths, the WHO said in its report, based on government data from 202 countries and regions.

By region, Asia has 55 percent of cases, and Africa has 31 percent.

Source : PTI