Governments in Africa need to start paying more than lip service to combat a virulent form of tuberculosis, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.
South Africa, where 78 people have recently died from either multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extremely-drug resistant
TB (XDR-TB), is hosting a two-day conference of regional health officials here to discuss the crisis.
Teguest Guerma, associate director at the department for HIV/AIDS at the United Nations' WHO, said that the dangers of drug resistant tuberculosis were particularly acute in southern Africa.
"The XDR-TB crisis is not in most in parts of the world. It will not be solved unless HIV and AIDS is properly considered and addressed," she said.
"Governments should take close and real collaborative measures ... So far they have only been paying lip service, nothing concrete on the ground."
Victims whose immune systems have been weakened by HIV
are particularly easy prey for drug-resistant tuberculosis.
United Nations estimates say that 29.4 million of the 42 million people living with AIDS worldwide reside in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO's TB department, said that successfully combating the problem of drug resistant tuberculosis in Africa would stop it in its tracks elsewhere.
"We need a lot more research, more than we have now," he said.
"If we are able to tackle TB in Africa, we'll be able to turn the tide against the disease in the world."
Around 450,000 new MDR-TB cases are estimated to occur every year, according to the WHO -- a small but worrying trend among the nine million annual tuberculosis infections as a whole.
More than 50 HIV-positive patients have died in South Africa's AIDS-ravaged KwaZulu-Natal province, dying within an average of 25 days from the point when the resistant TB was first suspected.
At any given moment, about 330,000 South Africans have tuberculosis and about 6,000 have the multiple drug resistant variant.