The European Union will ask all member states to draft action plans to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, as a new drug-resistant form of the disease is becoming an increasing threat, the EU health commissioner said Tuesday.
Markos Kyprianou said the EU must increase its efforts to fight tuberculosis, as the emergence of a new extremely drug-resistant strain, XDR-TB, has caused increasing concern about a widespread epidemic in Europe.
"We can't underestimate the threat of drug-resistant TB strains," Kyprianou said after inaugurating the new headquarters for the EU's disease control agency, ECDC, in Stockholm. "We want to take all necessary actions to prevent the disease from spreading."
The ECDC will ask all member states to draft individual action plans for fighting TB before the end of the year, agency director Zsuzsanna Jakab said.
The high levels of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the Baltic countries, Eastern Europe and Central Asia have already led international health officials to create the "Stop TB Partnership in Europe" to fight the epidemic in Europe.
Jakab said about 92,000 cases of TB were reported in the EU member states during 2005, which is low by international standards. But in places like the Baltic countries, nearly 20 percent of the cases involved drug-resistant strains, she said.
"This is mainly a problem in the Baltic states," Jakab said. "We have to take the Baltic states as a major target area."
The respiratory illness, spread by coughing and sneezing, is the world's deadliest curable infectious disease. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.7 million people die from TB every year.