Health officials and experts from about 25 countries will meet in the Chinese capital later this week to discuss serious health threats caused by multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (M/XDR-TB).

Together with the World Health Organization (WHO), they will make an urgent call for global action to curb the increasingly dangerous infectious disease through better prevention and treatment, the WHO said on Monday.

The three-day meeting beginning Wednesday will ask the countries with the most M/XDR-TB cases, including India, China, Russia and South Africa, to draft their five-year national plans for the disease control, the WHO said in a document published on its Web site (www.who.int).

The organization said more than 9 million new TB cases emerge around the world each year, including half a million M/XDR-TB cases, which is now "one of the world's deadliest diseases."

Although TB is preventable and treatable, when TB bacillus becomes resistant to the two most powerful first-line anti-TB drugs, the disease develops into the multidrug-resistant TB.

The more serious XDR-TB, a sub-set of MDR-TB caused by highly drug-resistant strains, is now reported in more than 50 countries -- mainly in Asia, Africa and Europe.

"Drug-resistant TB has a higher mortality rate and is significantly more difficult and more costly to treat than drug-susceptible TB," said the document.

The organization estimates that 1.7 million people die from TB annually. It blamed improper use of drugs and mismanagement of treatment for causing multidrug resistance.

"Only some 3 percent of estimated cases of MDR-TB are being treated according to WHO standards, while many more MDR-TB patients are mismanaged by various public and private health-care providers," it said.

The meeting participants, including WHO Director-General Margaret Chan and software tycoon Bill Gates, are expected to call for "urgent and necessary commitments for actions and funding" to prevent the "impending epidemic."

"If countries do not, they will face the prospect of a bigger M/XDR-TB epidemic," the WHO warned.

(Xinhua News Agency March 31, 2009)