Tuberculosis patients in some of the countries joining the European Union in May are ten times more likely to have the most deadly strain of the disease than the rest of the world, a new report showed today.
A World Health organisation survey of more than 67,000 TB patients in 77 countries, published in Brussels, identifies three new member states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - as among those in eastern Europe and Central Asia where multi drug-resistant TB, known as MDR-TB, is rampant.
An East European TB patient is already known to have infected six Dutch nationals, two of whom have developed pulmonary tuberculosis.
The WHO estimates there are 300,000 new cases of MDR-TB worldwide, with 79 per cent of cases being "super strains", resistant to at least three of the four main drugs used to cure TB.
Curing "normal" TB is cheap and effective, but treating drug-resistant TB is a hundred times more expensive.
As well as singling out some Baltic States, the WHO study identifies Kazakhstan, parts of the Russian Federation, Uzbekistan, China, Ecuador, Israel and South Africa as hotspots for MDR-TB.
And it points out that the highest prevalence of the disease coincides with one of the world's fastest growing HIV infection rates in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Patients with multi drug-resistant tuberculosis do not respond to the two most important drugs used to treat tuberculosis, and their chances of recovery are poor, according to the WHO.
In Russia a patient with normal tuberculosis has a 78 per cent chance of recovery - but the odds fall to just 10 per cent for patients with MDR-TB.