CAPE TOWN - The global tuberculosis epidemic seems to have peaked for the first time in history, a senior World Health Organisation official said on Thursday.
Mario Raviglione, head of the WHO's Stop TB department, was speaking at a media briefing in Cape Town, where TB experts from across the world are meeting at a conference on lung health.
"It is peaking at about 8.8 million new cases of active tuberculosis a year," he said.
This was a consequence of the epidemic peaking in the former Soviet Union, where TB had been rampant since the fall of communism, and in Africa, where the epidemic had been growing at ten percent a year since the advent of HIV in the mid-1980s.
"If this is confirmed... that we might have reached a peak, that would be a major step forward," he said.
"It will say what we have done at least is contained this epidemic."
However he warned that at the rate the fight against TB was going, it would take millennia to conquer the disease.
He said funding for TB research and development was only a fraction of what was needed.
Experts say over 1.6 million people die of TB worldwide every year, and that 200,000 of these deaths are of people who also have HIV.
They say some two billion people -- a third of the world's population --are infected with dormant TB bacilli.
Earlier on Thursday, the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development announced that trials of two possible TB drugs were showing promise.
One of them, moxifloxacin, had the potential to shorten treatment time for drug-subsceptible TB from six to four months, or less.
This was undergoing phase three clinical trials.
The second drug, PA-824, being tested on TB patients in Cape Town, showed promise in treating drug-resistant TB.
The prolonged treatment time for TB has been cited as one of the reasons for patients abandoning treatment, which in turn leads to the development of drug-resistant strains of the disease.