Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that affects the lungs. The WHO says as many as 18 million people have it. And 1.7 million people a year die from it.

And they fear that a more resistant strand could replace the treatable kind.

PAUL NUNN: Tuberculosis flourishes in conditions of overcrowding, poor ventilation, poor nutrition and inadequate health services. 

Paul Nunn is with the WHO’s Stop TB Department. He says there is a link between poverty and TB.

NUNN: Tuberculosis is clearly present even in countries as you would describe as rich and that’s because it is an infectious disease.

The treatable kind of TB has an 85 percent survival rate.But survival rates for the two resistant strands plummet. One called MDR has a 65 percent survival rate. The other, XDR has 30 percent survival.

The irony is that the more the diseases is treated the more resistant they become, especially if treatment isn’t thorough.

NUNN: We recommend that any patient with tuberculosis is treated with at least four drugs. If a patient is not getting better, it may be they are resistant to all of those or three of those four drugs. If you add just one more drug, you’re just inviting the situation where the patient will develop additional resistance to that particular drug. And this kind of amplification of resistance goes on, and so you move from being resistant to just one drug to being resistant to several.

The disease also has ties to HIV. 

HIV patients in some countries were twice as likely to have the drug-resistant form of TB as patients without HIV.

Western Europe has relatively low numbers compared to several other Eastern European and Asian blocks.But the WHO says the disease still occurs in the area and compliancy on it will result in a major International outbreak.

The organization is looking to fill a 2.5 billion dollar gap in tuberculosis funding to expand many labs and build new ones in Africa, which, the WHO says, is severely under equipped.

Alex Helmick, World Radio Switzerland at the United Nations in Geneva.