The declaration was made in a resolution adopted at the end of the Regional Committee for Africa’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 programs 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, said WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Luis Gomes Sambo. 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.
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.