October 11, 2002
TB kills six of the world's poorest people every minute, yet wealthy Western countries are not adequately funding a global effort to fight the disease, said Stephen Lewis, UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa. Far from being a relic of the past, TB has emerged as a threat primarily in poor countries, where sanitation, water and food are substandard, Lewis told a world conference on lung health Thursday in Montreal. "The impoverishment is like some kind of onslaught on a society that is already deeply and desperately vulnerable," Lewis said. He said the world goal of cutting poverty in half will never be reached "so long as there's this terrible witch's brew between impoverishment and disease."