The World Health Organisation has declared tuberculosis an emergency in Africa after cases of the killer disease tripled in countries with high rates of HIV and doubled on the continent as a whole since 1990.
The declaration was made in a resolution adopted by African health ministers at the WHO's regional committee's 55th session, held in the coastal Mozambican capital of Maputo.
"The declaration has been taken that TB is to be declared an emergency in Africa," said Mario Raviglione, the WHO's Stop TB department director.
"The resolution urges among other things, immediate measures by member states to implement emergency strategies and to intensify actions in the fight against the disease," he told AFP from Maputo.
TB is the world's second largest infectious killer after HIV/AIDS, causing an estimated two million deaths every year, according to WHO figures.
In African countries with high rates of HIV and AIDS the number of tuberculosis cases is still steeply climbing as opposed to the rest of the world, where rates have remained fairly constant or are even on the decline.
Raviglione said that a range of actions had been decided on by the meeting of the health ministers, based on a two-year "blueprint" developed by the global Stop TB partnership, which comprises various organisations cooperating in the fight against the disease.
The declaration called for the rapid improvement of TB detection and treatment in combination with anti-retroviral drugs for AIDS treatment, the expansion of national partnerships and recruitment of more trained staff.
"This declaration will help us on two major fronts: first it gives us a tool to negotiate (the seriousness of the disease) in endemic countries; and secondly it will help in donor countries as a weapon to mobilise additional resources," Raviglione said.