Europe’s tuberculosis hub Britain seeks to wipe out the disease
By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) – Health authorities launched an 11.5 million pounds plan on Monday to tackle Britain's persistent tuberculosis (TB) problem, seeking to wipe the contagious lung disease out altogether. Britain has one of the highest TB rates in western Europe and London is known as the continent's “TB capital”. If current trends continue, England alone will have more TB cases than the whole of the U.S. in two years. “TB should be consigned to the past, and yet it is occurring in England at higher rates than most of Western Europe,” said Paul Cosford, a director at the government's health agency, Public Health England (PHE).