According to Orissa Tuberculosis Association advisor Professor S N Tripathy, an estimated 14 million people in the country have TB and 2.2 million new cases are being added every year.

He was addressing a press conference here yesterday in connection with the three-day national conference on TB and chest diseases beginning here on December 27.

Professor Tripathy said the magnitude of the disease could be imagined, with 35 lakh people found to be sputum positive and each positive case having the possibility to infect ten other healthy individuals in a year. He said one-third of the world's population had TB, while three million people lost their lives to the disease in 1995 alone.

Pointing out that 75 per cent of TB cases in developing countries were in the economically productive age group, he attributed the highincidence of the disease mainly to poverty, inadequate political commitment and funding. Tripathy called for a revised national TB control programme to detect at least 70 per cent of the new sputum positive cases in order to achieve 85 per cent cure rate.