Brazzaville, 4 May 2005 -- The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambo, has called on African governments to allocate adequate resources to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria - three diseases which rank among the top killers in Africa.
Dr Sambo's appeal was contained in his address to a special session on 'TB control in the African region' organized as part of a 3-4 May meeting of the Stop TB Partnership Coordinating Board in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The Regional Director suggested that funds for containing the diseases be mainstreamed into international development agendas such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Global Fund for the fight against HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria and the Commission For Africa, among others.
On TB, the focus of the meeting, Dr Sambo stated that an estimated 2.4 million TB cases and 500,000 TB-related deaths were recorded every year in Africa which had just 11% percent of the world's population but contributed at least 27% of notified TB cases worldwide annually.
Alluding to the high and rising incidence of HIV-associated TB in the region, Dr Sambo said: "Part of the TB explosion is due to its association with the HIV epidemic which, itself, has become the most important risk factor for increased TB incidence and mortality". He explained that HIV prevalence among TB patients in some southern and eastern African countries exceeded 70%, much higher than for any other HIV risk groups.
Dr Sambo added : " People living with HIV run an estimated 10% risk of developing TB every year, whereas those without HIV run only a 10% risk in their whole lifetime. As a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the capacity of health services to provide care for TB patients is being seriously compromised ".
Despite the several obstacles to TB control, Dr Sambo said, WHO was actively exploring the different contexts of ongoing macro-economic reforms in countries, and various international development initiatives and mechanisms, to push the health agenda. He illustrated this point with a recent partnership meeting, in Brazzaville, of the WHO Regional Office for Africa, the African Union, the Economic Commission for Africa and Regional Economic Communities, at which the participating bodies agreed to work together in supporting countries towards the attainment of the health MDGs.
Dr Sambo told the session that WHO was currently decentralizing is resources in the African Region in order to boost capacity at country level and leverage resources for the implementation of the Road Map to halt Africa's spiraling epidemic of tuberculosis. The Road Map, unveiled at the global Stop TB Partnership meeting, calls for the establishment of an African Stop TB Partnership to build greater political commitment by governments to fight the disease, and for the African Union and NEPAD to mainstream TB control into the region's health and development agenda. It estimates that $1.1 billion will be needed in 2006-2007 to strengthen TB programmes and scale up measures to address HIV-associated TB in Africa.
The WHO Regional Director called on the Stop TB Partnership to continue to promote and facilitate the implementation of the DOTS strategy and assist countries to attain agreed international targets, adopt strategies that direct international focus on a larger number of African countries, facilitate operational research on new technologies for diagnosis and treatment, support the use of best drug combinations as the minimum standard of care, and promote the scale-up of TB/HIV interventions.

For further information, contact: 
Mr Samuel T. Ajibola, 
Tel: + 47 241 39378, 
Email : ajibolas [at] afro.who.int