Morning Briefing

"A third of the world's population is carrying tuberculosis [TB], and the disease could become incurable if governments fail to act, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned," noting that a "[l]ack of funding for public health programs, the sale of inaccurate blood tests and the misuse of drugs, particularly in the private health sector, are hampering the fight against the disease and leading to drug resistance," the Independent reports. "The rate of TB deaths had declined dramatically -- by 40 percent between 1990 and 2000 -- after a worldwide health campaign, which was particularly successful in China," but "the emergence of drug-resistant strains threatens to halt progress and jeopardizes the WHO's goal of eradicating the disease as a public health problem by 2050," the newspaper writes, noting, "Two billion people are carriers of the TB bacillus" globally.