China must not give up TB fight: WHO representative

China has made "significant achievements" in the past two decades in controlling tuberculosis, but it can do more in stamping out the disease, said Bernhard Schwartlander, WHO representative in China, on Friday in Beijing.

He made the remarks at a ceremony to commemorate World Tuberculosis Day, which falls on March 24 every year.

In the 1990s, China adopted the Directly Observed Treatment Short-course recommended by the World Health Organization to fight the disease. Data from national epidemiological surveys in 1990, 2000 and 2010 show that the prevalence of smear-positive tuberculosis fell by 65 percent from 1990 to 2010, from 170 cases per 100,000 people to 59 per 100,000, according to a study published on The Lancet on Tuesday.

This means that China has already reached the target set in the Millennium Development Goal to reduce the prevalence of TB by 50 percent by 2015 from 1990 levels, the National Center for Tuberculosis Control and Prevention at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in an online news release on Wednesday.

But there are still almost 1 million new cases in China every year, of which about 100,000 are missed by the health system, and only a minority of the approximately 60,000 patients with multi-drug resistance tuberculosis get the services they need to be cured, according to Schwartlander.

"We are looking to the innovative powers of China to contribute to the global fight against tuberculosis through new technologies, new treatments that are needed not only in China but in other countries as well," he said.

New technologies include ways to detect and treat TB and to provide affordable diagnosis and treatments when The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria stops funding China's effort to fight the disease in June, said Wang Lixia, director of the National Center for Tuberculosis Control and Prevention, also the leading author of the study published in The Lancet medical journal.

"Under our program with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, several cities and provinces have begun using gene chips to diagnose the infection in a shorter time span," she said. "More important, we need new ways to raise funds. The country's government and the international society have been setting aside money for the national program. But our cooperation with The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria will end in June."

In addition, the country is going to transfer operation of the national program to fight TB from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hospitals, she added.

"It was reasonable for the CDCs in the country to shoulder the responsibility to test and provide treatment to the patients when the program started, but from the current perspective, it should be the hospitals that take over the responsibility," she said. "We are trying to change the role of the CDCs to helping the National Health and Family Planning Commission supervise the hospitals' performance in diagnosing and treating TB."

Wang said there should be more ways to encourage hospitals to take on the task so that people can continue to receive affordable diagnoses and treatment of TB.