Five thousand people die from tuberculosis every day, although the disease is both preventable and curable. Clearly, we must work harder if we are to achieve, by 2015, the Millennium Development Goal of halting and beginning to reverse the spread of TB as one of the world’s major diseases. Thanks to a massive scale-up of the DOTS strategy for TB control recommended by the World Health Organization, with 17 million persons treated in nine years, our prospects for reaching the goal have improved greatly. WHO reports that eight in 10 patients are successfully treated under DOTS programmes, and that 45 per cent of infectious patients were treated in 2003 -- up from.
