The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Committee for Africa comprising health ministers from 46 Member States has declared tuberculosis an emergency in the African region - a response to an epidemic that has more than quadrupled the annual number of new TB cases in most African countries since 1990 and is continuing to rise across the continent, killing more than half a million people every year.

The declaration was made in a resolution adopted at the end of the Committee's fifty-fifth session in Maputo, Mozambique. The resolution urges Member States in the African Region to commit more human and financial resources to strengthen DOTS programmes and scale up collaborative interventions to fight the co-epidemic of TB and HIV. These and other measures recommended by the Committee encompass those laid out in a "blueprint" developed by the global Stop TB Partnership, which calls for US $2.2 billion in new funding for TB control in Africa during 2006-2007.

"Despite commendable efforts by countries and partners to control tuberculosis, impact on incidence has not been significant and the epidemic has now reached unprecedented proportions,” WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Luis Gomes Sambo said adding, “Urgent and extraordinary actions must be taken, or else the situation will only get worse and the TB targets in the Abuja Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals will not be achieved."

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, African countries like Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi were among the first to apply what became the global TB control strategy now known as DOTS. But in the past 15 years, TB incidence rates have soared in the region - to as high as four-fold in Malawi and five-fold in Kenya, to cite some typical examples -due largely to the link with HIV/AIDS, poverty and weak health systems. Although countries have made efforts to treat the rising tide of TB cases, they are still being outpaced by the epidemic.

Globally, TB is second only to HIV/AIDS as a cause of illness and death of adults, accounting for nearly nine million cases of active disease and two million deaths every year. Although it has only 11% of the world's population, Africa accounts today for more than a quarter of this global burden with an estimated 2.4 million TB cases and 540,000 TB deaths annually.