Inadequate labs fuel spread of drug-resistant TB in Asia-Pacific

"This is a serious situation," said Shigeru Omi, director of WHO's Western Pacific Region, which is headquartered in Manila. "Outbreaks of multidrug-resistant TB are going unnoticed constantly. We are worried this silent epidemic could set us back years."

"We could lose the gains made in recent years," he added.

Undetected and untreated, a TB patient could infect 10 to 15 people a year, simply by coughing or sneezing. Infections could also spread on long-haul flights, WHO said.

It warned that the spread of drug-resistant TB would be a "nightmare" since it takes up to two years to treat the disease with medicines that have serious side effects and cost 100 times more than the regular regimen of drugs.

"Without adequate laboratory support, we don't know what drugs still work," Omi said. "We don't even know the true scale of the problem."

Most developing countries rely almost exclusively on the 125-year-old microscopy method to confirm infectious TB, but drug resistance must be detected with "culture methods," whose costs and complexities hamper their widespread use, the UN agency said.

Although culture methods are used routinely in developed countries, there are only a few laboratories in some countries in East Asia and the Pacific that are able to conduct such tests.

Cambodia and the Philippines, for example, each have only three laboratories able to diagnose multidrug-resistant TB by culture methods, even though TB is a leading cause of death in both countries.

Pieter Van Maaren, WHO regional adviser for ...