London was declared the European capital of tuberculosis today with almost 3,500 new cases last year.
If trends of infection continue, within two years Britain is likely to have more new cases of TB each year than the United States, according to a report from the government’s health agency, Public Health England (PHE).
More than 8,750 TB cases were reported in Britain in 2012, which is around 14 per 100,000 of the population.
According to the PHE report, London had the main burden of TB infections in Britain in 2012 with 3,426 cases, almost 40% of the national total.
Almost three-quarters of people diagnosed with TB were migrants from areas of the world where TB is common, such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the proportion of TB cases that were resistant to one of several drugs was under 2%, drug-resistant TB “remains a problem”, the report added.