Almost half of all people with the multi-drug resistant tuberculosis disease are in China and India, says the World Health Organisation in its latest report. It estimates that 440,000 people worldwide had multi-drug-resistant forms of the disease (MDR-TB) with about one-third of them fatal. The report based on the figure till 2008 says that there were 9.8 million cases of tuberculosis, with 1.8 million resulting in death. The report says that northwestern Russia had 28 percent of all people newly diagnosed with TB, which is highest in the region. The standard dose of antibiotics does not work in MDR-TB, and stronger drugs must be used, often for a longer time. The report used new methods and surveillance data from countries around the world to collect the figure. Read the entire report: http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2010/9789241599191_eng.pdf