The reality that some internationally-agreed goals for fighting tuberculosis will not be achieved by 2015 is a "pretty damning indictment" of the insufficient resources made available, a leading American researcher, Dr Clifton Barry, says.
Among the Kyoto Millennium Goals was a bid to halve the number of people in Africa with tuberculosis by 2015.
Dr Barry is chief of the tuberculosis research section at the National Institutes of Health, in the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, at Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr Barry and Dr Jo White, the Pennsylvania-based chief medical officer at VGX Pharma- ceuticals, were in Dunedin last week as keynote speakers at the two-day Webster Centre Symposium on infectious diseases, held at St Margaret's College, Dunedin.
About 80 people attended the event.
Dr Barry said he was most hopeful that significantly better diagnostic methods and better drugs to fight Tb would become available over the next 10 years, but creating new vaccines was more difficult.
More resources were being devoted to Tb in the United States, but overall global resources were insufficient, and efforts to fight Tb were complicated by a lack of the effective lobby groups which had boosted funds for fighting HIV, he said.
Dr White said the combination of HIV infection and Tb in some developing countries was highly damaging, and the Tb threat in many developing countries was "just like a bomb going off".
Nevertheless, the problem remained under-appreciated and attracted insufficient media coverage, she said in an interview.
Prof Kurt Krause, who is director of the Webster Centre for Infectious Diseases at the University of Otago, said that tuberculosis remained an "enormous problem", causing about two million deaths each year, and with an estimated two billion people having a latent form of the disease.
Tuberculosis was not a huge problem in New Zealand, but the disease did exist here.
Otago University had some high quality Tb researchers, but insufficient research funding was available in New Zealand, Prof Krause said.
The symposium had proved successful, bringing together many people and perspectives, he said.
