In 1993 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced tuberculosis a global problem of humanity. It was for the first time in its history when WHO made such a statement. Annually more than 8 million new cases occur in the world and about 2 million deaths (5,000 a day) result from TB.
 
In Ukraine the scale of rapidly expanding disease, mortality and disability caused by it pose a real threat to national security. Ukraine is in second place in Europe after Russia as for the number of TB cases. Epidemic TB figures in Ukraine by 10-12 times exceed TB figures in developed countries. About 2/3 of TB infected people in Ukraine are people of working and childbearing age. As of 01/01/2007 anti-TB institutions records showed 99,449 people infected with different forms of active TB. 
 
The worst TB situation is in Khersonskaya Oblast ( 174,0 per 100 thousand pop),  Luganskaya Oblast  ( 114,3 per 100 thousand pop),  Nikolayevskaya Oblast ( 111,1 per 100 thousand pop),  Kirovogradskaya Oblast ( 109,9 per 100 thousand pop) and Donetskaya Oblast ( 103,4 per 100 thousand pop). And the epidemic threshold is 50 patients per 100 thousand pop.
 
Just in 2006 TB incidence among children increased by 8% and the number of people infected with destructive TB increased by 9%, which means diagnostics at a late stage. Annually about 40 thousand new TB cases occur in Ukraine and about 10 thousand cases result in death. 
 
Tuberculosis takes more lives than any other contagious and parasitic diseases taken together.
 
Still there are lots of hospitals where there are no good microscopes in laboratories and doctors and nurses do not know how to treat TB in the right way and do not have the required drugs. As the result we see the failure of both diagnostic and treatment processes. The patient who is not treated in the right way or in a timely manner stops reacting to standard antibiotics and the cost of therapy increases by 10 times.
 
Reference
Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease caused by TB mycobacterium (TB bacilli) and spread mostly through the air from an infected person to a healthy one. According to statistics, one person with active TB disease will infect on average between 15 and 20 people, which in their turn start infecting more people. That’s why if the epidemic has started it spreads quite quickly.