TB 'explosion' threatens North Korea and neighbours

North Korea is on the verge of an “explosion” in drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) when funding to fight the fatal lung disease dries up this week.

TB is the world’s deadliest infectious disease and kills thousands of people in the isolated communist state.

But the number of cases is set to jump when lifesaving treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients finishes at the end of this month, reports the UK Telegraph.

While Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme has raised world tensions, a public health disaster may be about to be unleashed that threatens neighbouring countries.

The Global Fund, the international organisation that bank rolls treatments for AIDS, malaria and TB, announced in February it would be end its North Korea programme.

It cited the “unique operating environment” there had proved an obstacle to “the required level of assurance and risk management around the deployment of resources and the effectiveness of the grant.”

But the world’s medical community fear an “explosion” in TB, with a ripple effect far beyond the hermit kingdom.

In an open letter to the UK medical journal Lancet, Harvard Medical School doctors warned the cuts would lead to “massive stock outs of quality-assured TB drugs nationwide” that would trigger the “rapid creation of drug-resistant TB strains”.

“An explosion of MDR–TB in North Korea would take decades to clean up and could detrimentally affect the public health of bordering countries like China and South Korea.”

The Global Fund has distributed about $95 million over the past eight years through Unicef and the World Health Organisation to combat TB in North Korea.