UNITED NATIONS Tuberculosis cases are expected to double in Africa over the next 10 years, driven by the rapid spread of AIDS, the United Nations said on Monday.

According to Reuters, the number of TB cases is growing at a rate of 10 percent a year in Africa and will reach 3.3 million a year by 2005, compared with fewer than 2 million new cases in 1999, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS, the UN anti-AIDS umbrella group, said in a joint statement.

The two diseases must be treated together as they are heavily interdependent and TB is a leading killer of people with AIDS, said UNAIDS and WHO, the UN health arm.

More than half of the sub-Saharan Africans infected with HIV -- the virus that causes AIDS -- go on to develop TB, the statement said.

As with AIDS, a major obstacle to caring for TB patients is the high cost of drugs required to treat the disease, which is transmitted through the air, via coughing, sneezing and even talking.

As TB progresses, it causes fever, weight loss and violent coughing, which helps spread the disease to others.

Nearly 2 billion people -- a third of the world's population -- are currently infected with the TB germ. Some 5 percent to 10 percent of these will eventually come down with the disease.

But people infected with both TB and HIV are 30 times more likely to become ill with tb than people infected with the TB germ alone, according to the statement.

Africa is the region hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. UNAIDS estimates that 25.3 million Africans were living with HIV infection or AIDS in 2000, and that 2.4 million people died of HIV-related causes in the same year.

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