"Low and middle-income countries need an additional $1.6 billion a year to fight tuberculosis [TB], threatening progress made against the world's second-deadliest infectious disease," the WHO and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said in a joint statement released Monday, Bloomberg reports (Bennett, 3/18). "The projection ... underscores the deepening epidemic of drug-resistant TB, the high cost of identifying and treating those complex and difficult cases, and the lack of health funding currently going toward it," according to the Wall Street Journal (McKay, 3/18). "'We are treading water at a time when we desperately need to scale up our response,' said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan," Agence France-Presse writes, adding, "Global Fund [Executive Director] Mark Dybul also said a funding hike was essential to help identify all new cases of tuberculosis, while simultaneously making progress against existing cases" (Fowler, 3/19).